My pregnant wife’s father and eight brothers beat her so brutally that our unborn child died, then stood outside her ICU room laughing while they told me I wasn’t powerful enough to touch them.

I opened the file on my secure terminal, my brow furrowing in confusion.

It wasn't an update on Richard or the brothers. It was a newly recovered surveillance photo from the night Clara was attacked.

Elias had been digging deeper into the financial records of Dr. Evans, the surgeon who had tried to murder Clara with the potassium syringe. We knew Vincent had handed him an envelope of untraceable bonds.

But the new photograph showed something we had missed.

It was a close-up of the white envelope Vincent had handed the doctor.

Zoomed in, enhanced by my technical team, a faint watermark was visible on the corner of the thick paper.

My blood ran completely cold.

It wasn't a bank logo. It wasn't Richard’s family crest.

It was a black serpent coiled around a dagger.

The symbol of the Syndicate. My Syndicate. The very organization I controlled.

I stared at the screen, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

Richard’s family was broke. They didn't have five hundred thousand dollars in untraceable bearer bonds to give to a surgeon. Someone else had provided that envelope to Vincent. Someone who wanted Clara dead, and wanted Richard’s family to take the fall for it.

Someone inside my own shadow empire.

My phone buzzed on the desk.

I picked it up. The caller ID was a string of zeroes.

“You cleaned up the mess beautifully, Adrian,” a distorted, mechanized voice whispered through the speaker. “But the throne is still empty. And she is still in the way.”