Chapter 2 - The Bluff
When Kieran’s hand slid into his dark cashmere coat, my chest seized. Every survival instinct screamed at me to step back, to put the shattered pieces of my desk between us.
He didn't pull a gun. Instead, his fingers emerged wrapped around a small, matte-black digital voice recorder. The tiny red standby light blinked like an accusing eye.
"Tell me who has them, Freya," he said, his voice dropping an octave, smooth and dangerous. "Tell me right now, and we can still handle this like civilized people. You walk away with the brownstone. You walk away with three million in clean, untraceable bonds. No more court battles. No more debt."
"Civilized?" I let out a dry, hollow laugh, though my knees trembled inside my tailored slacks. I glanced down at the smoking debris of my laptop. "You broke into my home. You destroyed my property. That’s not a negotiation, Kieran. That’s a felony."
"This family doesn't get prosecuted for felonies," he whispered, stepping closer, his expensive cologne—sandalwood and arrogance—choking the small room. "You know that better than anyone. So I will ask you one last time. Who did you send the foundation ledgers to?"
He was terrified. Underneath the razor-sharp jawline and the Abernathy pedigree, his eyes were darting toward the window, checking the quiet suburban street behind him. He wasn't acting on his mother's orders; he was acting out of sheer, unadulterated panic.
That gave me the edge I needed.
"Do you really think I kept only one local copy?" I lied, holding his gaze without flinching. My heart hammered against my ribs, but my voice remained steady, cold as winter frost. "The moment I unlocked that encrypted partition at six this morning, a cloud mirror script triggered. It went to Marcus Vance's secure server. If I don't enter my secondary authentication passphrase by noon, the entire archive—including the 2018 offshore wire transfers—auto-forwards to the Southern District of New York."
Kieran stopped dead in his tracks. His face drained of color, leaving his skin sickly and pale against the morning light.
"You're bluffing," he hissed.
"Try me," I said, pointing toward the open front door. "You have three hours before Marcus opens his inbox. If I were you, I'd go ask Eleanor what she wants to tell the federal prosecutors."
For five agonizing seconds, Kieran stood frozen, weighing whether to strangle the truth out of me or run. The ticking clock in his head won. He jammed the recorder back into his pocket, wheeled around without another word, and slammed my front door so hard the glass transom rattled above the frame.
The second his tires screeched against the asphalt outside, my legs gave out. I collapsed onto the floor among the shards of cracked plastic and shattered glass, gasping for air.
My bluff had worked. But there was no cloud mirror. There was no auto-forwarding script to the federal prosecutor.
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There was only a single, encrypted titanium flash drive taped under the bathroom sink—and Kieran was going straight to his mother.
***
