My husband thought he had finished what he started on the staircase when he locked my ICU door and pressed a pillow over my face. Adrian had already left me shattered inside a near-full-body cast after I confronted him about my life insurance, but what he didn't know was that people were listening, and they were about to hear him confess.

I sat in the shadows beneath the pier, the wind biting through my wet clothes as Victor’s ultimatum echoed in my head.

He had Clara.

My younger sister, Clara, had no idea about Erebus, the life insurance policy, or the corruption. She was an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a war she didn't even know existed.

I pulled up the Erebus files on the laptop, my fingers flying across the keyboard despite the burning pain in my hands.

If Victor controlled the police, the media, and the state courts, I couldn't beat him using standard legal channels. I had to use his own weapon against him: the press.

I routed the laptop’s connection through five encrypted proxy servers, establishing a secure line to the personal terminal of Sarah Lin—the chief investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and an old friend from my auditing days.

"Hannah?!" Sarah’s voice gasped through the speaker. "Where are you?! The police just issued a Statewide Blue Alert for you! They said you're armed and extremely dangerous!"

"Sarah, listen to me very carefully," I said, my voice steady despite the shivering. "Everything they are telling you is a lie. Victor Vance is running Erebus Holdings. I am sending you twenty gigabytes of audited bank statements, offshore wire transfers, and execution orders signed by his chief of staff."

A long silence hung on the line as Sarah opened the incoming file transmission.

"My God..." Sarah whispered, her breath catching as she scrolled through the files. "This... this goes all the way to the Federal Reserve. Hannah, if I publish this—"

"If you publish this, Victor will try to stop your printing presses," I interrupted. "You need to broadcast it live during his morning press conference at 7:00 AM."

"And what are you going to do?" Sarah asked, her tone filled with dread.