I stare out the window at the darkening European skyline. Something about this feels deliberate, calculated. The absence of chaos is worse than its presence.
Sylvester notices my tension. “You’re thinking it’s a trap?”
I don’t answer right away. My jaw tightens. My fingers drum against the armrest. “Not a trap,” I murmur finally. “A message. They want us to feel safe. To think we’ve won.”
Vivian watches me from across the cabin, her hand brushing against her mother’s. She doesn’t speak—she knows better than to break the quiet—but I can see the worry in her eyes mirror my own.
I lean back, closing my eyes for the briefest of seconds. The Rusnak code is simple: never let your guard down, never assume victory, never underestimate the enemy.
The jet hums steadily beneath us, carrying us home—but I know better. Something waits, and when it strikes, it’ll be designed to hurt…and to make us pay.
But I won’t be caught off guard. Not again.
***
Back in New York, everything moves fast.
The moment the jet touches down, I call the family doctor. He arrives within the hour, a discreet man who’s patched up half the Rusnak line without ever speaking a word to the wrong ears.
Vivian refuses to leave her mother’s side. She helps settle her in one of the guest suites, hovering with a tenderness I’ve never seen from her before. When the doctor arrives, she stays in the room with him, arms folded, protective, unblinking. I don’t blame her.
While she tends to her mother, Sylvester and I hole up in the study.
The lights are low; the only illumination comes from the monitors spread across the desk. Lines of code flicker across the screens—Deveraux’s encrypted drives. He was arrogant enough to think we’d never get them. He forgot who he was dealing with.
Sylvester cracks his knuckles. “He used a double-layered cipher,” he mutters. “Old-school. Complicated. But doable.”
I take a seat, my mind already shifting back into battlefield mode. “Start stripping the shell. I’ll work through the internal locks.”
For hours, we work in silence—furious, methodical, relentless. Every firewall we break, every layer we peel back, every corrupted file we salvage tells me one thing. We’re about to uncover a secret that may change our lives.
Hours later, we find it.
A folder buried so deep it shouldn’t exist.
A series of mirrored backups meant to wipe in case of breach.
But Sylvester catches the fail-safe before it detonates, and we decrypt the final layer together.
What appears on the screen freezes the room.
Names.
Dates.
Wire transfers.
Encrypted call logs routed through burner networks tied to the Kovals.
But the signature—
The signature is what stops my breath cold.
Not Deveraux.
Not Koval.
Not even any of the usual European intermediaries.
