Chương 2 - The Consequence
Meline stepped out into the freezing Manhattan night without a coat.
She pulled out her phone and checked her banking app under the glow of a streetlamp.
Her checking account held exactly two hundred and fourteen dollars.
Her mother’s next round of neurological treatments was due in three days, and it would cost four thousand dollars.
Meline closed her eyes and let out a long, shaky breath.
She had let her pride win, and now Evelyn was going to pay the price.
She descended into the subway station, her mind already shifting back into the analytical gear she hadn’t used in three years.
Preston Caldwell was a billionaire with endless resources and a reputation for crushing anyone who stood in his way.
She was an unemployed waitress living in a cramped apartment in Queens.
But she had one distinct advantage over him.
Preston believed she was a nobody who had simply picked up Arabic by accident.
He did not know she used to dismantle terrorist financing networks for the United States government.
Meline arrived at her apartment building and quietly unlocked the front door.
Evelyn was asleep in the small bedroom, her breathing shallow and uneven.
Meline walked into the tiny kitchen and pulled a dusty metal lockbox from the top shelf of the pantry.
She opened it and took out a heavily encrypted, military-grade laptop she had sworn never to turn on again.
She booted up the machine and bypassed three layers of biometric security.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she began running search algorithms on Caldwell and Hayes Capital.
She needed to find the offshore Geneva accounts Preston had mentioned before he could finalize the Dubai liquidation.
A sudden, heavy knock on her apartment door shattered the quiet of the room.
Meline froze, her eyes darting to the digital clock on the stove, which read two in the morning.
No one knocked on a door in this neighborhood at two in the morning with good intentions.
She silently slid a sleek combat knife from the lining of her old tactical bag.
May you like
She crept toward the front door and peered through the peephole.
Two large men in dark suits were standing in the dim hallway, and one of them was holding a suppressed pistol.
