Chapter 14 - The Master Study
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Silas watched the loading bar on his laptop screen race toward one hundred percent.
“It’s connecting to the offshore servers,” Silas confirmed, his eyes fixed on the glowing text. “Bypassing the first firewall. We’re in. The extraction is initiating.”
Genevieve let out a harsh, victorious laugh. “Perfect. Once the transfer is complete, drop the poison in his scotch decanter. We leave through the service tunnels.”
But suddenly, the loading bar on Silas’s screen turned bright red.
The laptop emitted a sharp, high-pitched warning beep.
Silas frowned, his fingers hammering the keys. “Wait. Something is wrong. The file structure is corrupt.”
“What do you mean corrupt?” Genevieve demanded, stepping closer. “Fix it!”
“I can't! It’s not extracting!” Silas yelled, panic suddenly bleeding into his voice. “The drive isn't sending data out... it’s downloading something into our system. It’s a reverse-malware script!”
Genevieve grabbed his shoulder. “Disconnect it! Pull the drive!”
Silas grabbed the black hard drive and yanked it violently from the USB port.
But it was too late.
The laptop screen flashed a brilliant, blinding white, and then displayed a single, simple message in bold black text:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION TO THE RIENZI FOUNDATION.
Silas stared at the screen in absolute, paralyzing horror. “It burned through our firewall. Genevieve... it didn't just drain the transfer accounts. The virus backtracked into the Falcone main syndicate servers in New York. It wiped everything. It drained all of it.”
Genevieve went stark white. “No. No, that’s impossible! How could he know?”
Before Silas could answer, the heavy mahogany doors of the study burst open with a deafening crash.
The doors didn't just open—the deadbolt was literally shot out of the wood.
Alessandro Rienzi walked into the room. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't playing the fool. He looked like the devil himself, holding a heavy, suppressed .45 caliber handgun, pointed directly at Silas’s chest.
“You forgot one detail about the biometric safe, Genevieve,” Alessandro said, his voice echoing coldly in the cavernous study.
Genevieve backed away, trembling violently. “Alessandro...”
“When an unauthorized drive is removed from that safe,” Alessandro continued, stepping fully into the room and kicking the broken doors shut behind him, “the room goes into lockdown.”
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He pressed a button on a remote in his pocket. Heavy steel shutters slammed down violently over the massive windows of the study, plunging the room into darkness, illuminated only by the glow of Silas’s ruined laptop.
“Welcome to the marriage,” Alessandro whispered.
