Chapter 6 - Ghosts from the Past
Richard was alive.
The man she had deeply mourned for three years, the man whose ashes sat in a golden urn on her mantle, was a ghost.
Victoria stared at the cracked screen of the burner phone until the video looped again.
Everything started to make a twisted, horrifying kind of sense.
The encrypted USB drive, the corrupted head of security, the brutal assassination of her sister.
Richard had faked his death to steal the Hale family fortune, and her sister Sarah had found out.
Sarah had gathered the evidence, hid it in the designer bag, and sent Maya to safety.
"Is that the bad man?" Maya asked, pointing a small, dirty finger at the glowing screen.
"Yes," Victoria whispered, a new, fiery rage replacing her absolute terror.
"He won't ever hurt us, Maya, I promise you."
They needed serious help, but Victoria knew she couldn't trust the police or her own employees.
There was only one person left in this city she could rely on.
Leo was an underground hacker who owed Victoria a massive favor from her early business days.
She scooped Maya up and they carefully snuck out of the shipyards toward the nearest subway station.
They rode the train in complete silence, hiding under the radar among exhausted late-night commuters.
An hour later, they knocked on the heavy steel door of a basement apartment in Brooklyn.
Leo opened it, taking one shocked look at the ruined billionaire and the shivering child.
"Get inside, quickly," the young man said, locking three heavy deadbolts behind them.
Victoria handed him the silver USB drive immediately without any explanation.
"I need you to crack this, Leo, and I need it done yesterday."
Leo plugged it into his massive computer rig, his fingers flying across the glowing mechanical keyboard.
Lines of green code reflected in his thick glasses as he aggressively bypassed the military-grade encryption.
"This is incredibly heavy stuff, Vic," Leo muttered, his face growing paler by the second.
"It's a ledger of offshore accounts, all funneling your company's money to a private island."
"Transfer it all back to the main corporate account," Victoria commanded.
"Wait, there's a locked audio file hidden here, let me play it," Leo said, clicking the mouse.
The speakers crackled to life, playing a recorded phone conversation between Richard and an older man.
"The sister is handled, and the child will be eliminated tonight," Richard's recorded voice said.
"Good, make sure there are absolutely no loose ends," the older man replied.
May you like
Victoria stumbled backward, knocking over a stack of empty energy drink cans.
The second voice on the recording belonged to her own father.
