Chapter 7 - Red Flags and Rain
"What do you mean, they're at the gates?" Elena demanded, dropping the envelope onto the table as if it were burning her skin. The blood rushed in her ears, drowning out the ambient sounds of the storm. She crossed the room in two strides, grabbing Clara by the forearm. "Who is at the gates, Clara? Talk to me!"
Clara winced, not from the grip, but from the sheer weight of what she was carrying. She looked past Elena to Julian, her expression one of utter defeat. "The Marshal's office. And a team from the Department of Financial Enforcement. They didn't come with a warrant for embezzlement, Elena. They came with a warrant for corporate identity theft and asset concealment under your father's name."
Julian slammed his hand onto the desk, rattling the antique inkwell. "That's impossible. The restructuring was sealed under a federal confidentiality waiver. No agency outside the Treasury department has jurisdiction over those numbers."
"Jurisdiction doesn't matter when someone on the inside hands them the master decryption keys," Clara shot back, finally breaking away from Elena to throw the leather briefcase onto the sofa. She flipped the brass latches, spilling a cascade of printed bank statements, encrypted emails, and notarized affidavits across the velvet cushions. "Look at the time stamps. These weren't leaked months ago. They were uploaded from a terminal inside this very house less than an hour before the power went out."
Elena stared at the documents, her chest tightening until every breath felt like inhaling crushed glass. Her father's study upstairs—the room that had remained locked since his funeral three weeks ago—was the only place in the entire estate with a direct hardline terminal to the private servers.
"Someone is in the house," Elena whispered, the realization dawning with terrifying clarity.
"Not someone," a deep, gravelly voice echoed from the dimly lit hallway outside the conservatory. "Family."
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The heavy oak doors, which Clara had locked just moments before, slowly drifted open on oiled hinges, revealing a tall figure standing in the shadows of the foyer, holding a silver revolver that caught the dim emergency lighting.
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