Bloodshot eyes, rimmed with a sleepless determination that bordered on obsession, peered at the glowing screen. The pale blue light highlighted the hollows beneath his cheekbones, making them look deeper than they were.
He couldn’t remember the last time he ate something that was not wrapped in plastic, or the last time he’d slept for more than forty minutes at a stretch. The office was a graveyard of crumpled energy drink cans and protein bar wrappers, proof of his relentless hunt.
He’d been chasing phantoms for days—weeks, really, but days since Wilson’s confession and Chester’s phone. Strings of code that led nowhere. Aliases layered on aliases. False trails that doubled back on themselves like a maze designed by someone who enjoyed watching rats run in circles.
This guy knew how to cover his tracks—that much was clear. The man had been careful. Methodical. Almost elegant in his deception. But David was nothing if not persistent. Somewhere in this digital labyrinth was a thread waiting to be pulled.
He danced his fingers over the keyboard, rapid-fire and urgent, checking the algorithms he had sifting through the data, narrowing down the possibilities with each pass. He scanned lines of code, looking for any anomaly, any echo of a pattern that didn’t belong. He’d run through countless IP addresses, each one a dead end, each one leading him to another faceless proxy server.
Until now.
He sat forward, squinting at a sequence that flickered across the display. It was subtle—a slight deviation in the metadata that most people would miss. But David wasn’t most people. He’d invested years honing this skill, turning it into something bordering on instinct. The trail led him through a series of shell corporations and dummy accounts. Each layer breached was a small victory, a shot of adrenaline.
The texts were corrupted, overwritten in spots, fragments of data that looked like digital confetti scattered across a hard drive. The outline of a name, nothing more than a ghost in the machine, hovered out of reach, teasing him. He worked meticulously, piecing together the shards of information, his mind racing ahead to anticipate the next fragment.
Then it was all there. A complete sequence, raw and untarnished.
The name—Marcus Sinclair—stared back at him from the monitor. Recognizable. A ghost from their past.
David’s hands trembled as he typed it out, letter by letter, into the search bar of his custom-built database. The blinking cursor taunted him, urging him to hurry, to uncover the truth hidden behind the keystrokes.
The display flickered, presenting a staccato rhythm of loading symbols, his heart pounding in sync. An eternity passed in the seconds it took for the search to finish. A full dossier, complete with a photo, spilled across the screen like a dam breaking.
“Marcus Sinclair.”
David’s pulse quickened as fragmented memories surfaced. He leaned back, his hand trembling as it hovered over the mouse. He felt an odd detachment, as if seeing himself from above. He remembered the man: a tall, hawk-like figure constantly hovering around Nick’s mother at gatherings—always too close, always watching her with a creepy intensity.
He jerked open a drawer and fumbled for a notepad and pen, his movements clumsy with sudden urgency. The pen almost tore through the paper as he scrawled the name. A ghost from the dusty corners of memory, someone unseen in over a decade.
“What the fuck…”
He glared at the pad, the name circled in thick, angry ink.
“Marcus Sinclair,” he rolled the syllables around in his mouth like a bitter taste. In a weird way, it fit.
The Marcus he remembered had been a master manipulator, a predator who wore charm like a second skin, who played mind games with people, stringing them along for his own amusement. David had always known there was something sinister beneath the surface, but he had never imagined Marcus would resurface in such a calculated, vicious way.
His stomach twisted.
This wasn’t some hired thug shaking them down for money. This wasn’t a competitor trying to edge them out of the market. Marcus hadn’t paid Chester to rattle the cage and disappear into the night. They’d been right.
This was personal.
Targeted.
Deliberate.
The realization struck him like a fist to the gut, stealing his remaining breath. Marcus wasn’t after their business. He was afterthem. After Nick. After what Nick built, everything he protected, everyone he loved.
David’s mind raced, flashing through memories of his brother—Nick’s unwavering strength, the way he’d always looked out for them all, even when it hadn’t been easy. The way Nick had taken David under his wing, even attending the same college to ensure David had a place to live. The way Nick had worked tirelessly to build the resort, to create a haven for people who needed it.
Now, Marcus was threatening all of that. The very heart of their family.
The burden of it bore down on him—heavy, suffocating, inescapable. David blew out a breath and rubbed at his temple, fingers coming away damp with sweat despite the cool air pumping through the vents. The office smelled of burned electronics and stale coffee, an acrid combination so mundane he scarcely noticed it.
The image of a shaken, scared Lena recoiling from the decapitated doll flashed into his mind. Chester Dinkley had done his best to intimidate her and had nearly succeeded. The look on her face—the fear she’d hidden behind anger, the tremble in her hands—still infuriated him. Marcus was responsible, pulling the strings from behind a curtain. Chester had been a pawn. Marcus called the shots, moved the pieces, sowing chaos and distrust.
But Marcus wouldn’t have moved without a catalyst.
