Chapter 8 - The Net Tightens
Four armed federal agents in tactical gear poured into the boardroom, their weapons held at low ready, their heavy boots slamming against the marble floor.
"Federal marshals! Nobody move!" the lead agent barked, his voice echoing off the glass walls.
Victoria spun around, her face instantly draining of color. The icy composure that had defined her corporate persona for a decade shattered in a single second. She lunged for the computer terminal, her fingers frantically clawing at the keyboard to delete the active transfer logs, but an agent was already across the room, grabbing her wrists and pinning her hands behind her back with a sharp click of steel handcuffs.
"Get your hands off me!" Victoria shrieked, all pretense of elegance evaporating as she was shoved hard against the mahogany table. "You can't do this! I am the Chief Operating Officer of Cole Global! This is an illegal detainment!"
"It's not detainment, Victoria. It's an arrest," Evan said, walking over to the desk and calmly unplugging the external hard drive she had been loading. He slipped it into his breast pocket. "Federal charges for corporate espionage, insider trading, and aiding a foreign financial syndicate. The US Attorney signed the warrants twenty minutes ago."
Victoria glared over her shoulder, her eyes burning with pure venom as federal agents read her her rights. "You think you've won, Evan? You think cutting off my head stops the Hydra? The board already approved the emergency transition. Even from a jail cell, I have enough allies in the banking sector to strip your voting rights before the market opens tomorrow morning!"
"Let them try," Evan replied smoothly, turning his back on her as the agents hauled her toward the private elevator. "They'll find the board seats they're relying on have already been preemptively restructured under a private trust."
The elevator doors closed with a dull thud, locking Victoria away and plunging the seventy-second floor back into an eerie, heavy silence.
Evan stood alone in the dim boardroom, the city lights reflecting off the glass around him. The immediate internal threat had been neutralized, but Victoria’s words echoed in his mind: The Hydra. There were others. People higher up in the global financial food chain who viewed his independent empire as a dangerous anomaly that needed to be crushed.
His phone buzzed in his hand.
It was a text from an unsaved, secure satellite number. It contained only a single address in an abandoned industrial dock district in Brooklyn, along with a four-word message:
Come and get them.
Evan stared at the screen, his instincts screaming that it was a trap. But it was also the only lead to the elusive mastermind pulling the strings behind both Julian Vance and Victoria Sterling.
May you like
He slid the phone into his pocket, adjusted his cuffs, and walked back toward the private elevator.
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