Chapter 26 - The Price of Loyalty
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The static on the comms line cleared after five excruciating seconds.
"Dad? Dad, answer me!" I pleaded into the microphone, my eyes glued to the static-covered thermal feed.
"I'm here, Mara," Dad's voice came through, slightly winded. "Foyer is clear."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, leaning my forehead against Maya’s soft head. "Are you hit?"
"Just a graze on the shoulder," he replied calmly. "The suit took the worst of it. The strike team is neutralized."
I checked the master network logs on my tablet. "They weren't here to kill us, Dad. Look at the data packet Sarah transmitted before you took her down. It wasn't an extraction order. It was a decoy signal."
"A decoy?" Dad asked, his footsteps heavy as he descended the stairs toward the sub-basement.
"They wanted us to go into lockdown," I realized, panic rising in my chest as I analyzed the code. "The iron blast shutters... they don't just keep people out. They isolate the estate's short-range frequency jamming!"
The steel door of the panic room unlocked, and Dad walked in, his arm bleeding slightly through his flannel shirt, but his posture still imposing.
"What does that mean, Mara?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.
"It means while we were focused on the mercenaries inside, Gabriel Vance was uploading a logic bomb into Vance Dynamics' global servers from the outside," I explained, showing him the rapid depletion of our corporate security firewalls on the tablet screen. "He’s wiping our digital assets, Dad. In ten minutes, Vance Dynamics won't exist on paper."
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"He's trying to bankrupt us before he strikes again," Dad concluded, his eyes darkening.
"No," I said, a dangerous realization dawning on me. "He’s trying to force me to leave this estate and go to the headquarters in London to manually stop the purge."
