CHAPTER 15: THE SECRET IN THE CLOCK
CHAPTER 15: THE SECRET IN THE CLOCK
After Christian left, we rushed to our father's old house. The property had been sold, but the new owners had allowed us to retrieve the remaining family heirlooms. The massive, antique mahogany grandfather clock stood in the corner of my apartment, ticking heavily. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. My father stood before it, his eyes wide with a realization that had taken twenty years to surface. "The rhythm of our favorite song," he whispered. "Your mother used to play a specific melody on the piano every night before Hannah left." "Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major." Hannah walked over to the clock, her fingers tracing the carved wooden molding around the pendulum. "The notes," Hannah said, her breath catching. "The mechanical gears inside this clock aren't factory standard." She opened the glass face, manually moving the brass hands. She didn't move them to a time. She moved them to correspond with the musical intervals of the song. Three o'clock. Seven o'clock. One o'clock. Five o'clock. Suddenly, a heavy metallic click echoed from inside the base. A hidden compartment behind the pendulum swung open slowly. Inside lay a single, dust-covered flash drive. Wrapped in a piece of blue velvet cloth. The exact same cloth our mother used to cover her jewelry box. I pulled the drive out, my hands trembling. "This is it," I whispered. "The unedited metadata from 2005." "The proof that Arthur Sterling and his son orchestrated the entire collapse of our family." Our father sank into a chair, tears streaming down his face. "She saved us," he murmured. "Even when I was too blind to see the danger, she saved us." Hannah plugged the drive into her secure laptop. The screen illuminated her face in bright green text. ACCESS GRANTED: PROJECT HORIZON DECRYPTION LOGS. "We have everything now, Evy," Hannah said, a cold smile appearing on her face. "Not just Arthur's crimes." "Christian's entire offshore infrastructure is coded into this drive." "We don't need to go to the warehouse to trade." "We are going to bring the entire Sterling empire down from here."
