Chapter 1 - The Attorney’s Warning
The silence in the grand bedroom of Crown Meridian Tower shattered the moment Sebastian pressed the phone to his ear, his voice flat and devoid of the warmth he had briefly shown me just seconds before.
“What happened, Mara?”
I pulled the blood-stained sheet tighter around my shoulders, watching the cold, ruthless transformation take over the man who had held me all night.
“You need to get down to the district holding cells, Sebastian,” Mara Feldman’s voice crackled through the speaker, tight with an urgency I had never heard from the brilliant criminal defense attorney. “Federal marshals just executed a predawn sweep of our shipping terminal in Brooklyn. They didn't seize cargo. They seized the backup servers.”
Sebastian didn’t blink. His dark eyes remained locked on the floor between us, though I could see the sudden tension coiling through the muscles of his broad shoulders.
“On whose authority?” Sebastian asked, his tone dropping into that lethal, quiet register that made enemies disappear. “The federal prosecutor’s office signed off on our compliance agreement six months ago.”
“That agreement just became toilet paper,” Mara replied sharply. “Someone inside our inner circle handed over the physical encryption keys—the ones only two people in this organization possessed: you, and your head of logistics, Julian Vance.”
A muscle twitched violently along Sebastian’s jawline. “Julian is dead. His car went off the Hudson bridge three years ago.”
“Then someone resurrected him,” Mara snapped back. “Or someone wearing his ring just walked into the federal building with the master ledger. Sebastian, if those servers are decrypted, half the syndicate goes away for life. And your name is at the top of every single file.”
Sebastian’s gaze slowly flicked back to me, lingering for a fraction of a second on my face before he tore his eyes away, making a decision that carved an immediate, freezing chasm between our worlds.
May you like
“I’m on my way,” he said, and ended the call.
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