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Instead, I feel like I walked into something I don’t fully understand. I’ve opened a door I can’t close.

Someone built that system. Someone designed it to hide hundreds of millions of dollars. Someone, somewhere, knows I was inside it.

I don’t know what happens next, but I have a feeling I’m going to find out soon.

Chapter Four - Maxim

The meeting is important.

I’m sitting at the head of a table in one of the estate’s private conference rooms, flanked by Ivan on my left and Kirill on my right.

Across from us, three men representing our shipping interests in the Black Sea region are explaining why their recent losses are my problem and not theirs. Their voices are steady and postures respectful, but I can see the tension in their shoulders. They know what happened to the last group of men who tried to shift responsibility onto me.

I’m listening to the presentation with half my attention. The details matter—our shipping routes through the Bosporus have been compromised by increased Turkish naval patrols, and we need to adjust our schedules accordingly—but I’ve already decided how this will end.

The men across from me will accept the new terms I’m about to offer, or they will be replaced by men who will. The meeting is a formality.

It’s during the discussion of alternate routes through Romanian waters that the door opens.

Andrei, my second in command, steps inside. He doesn’t knock; he simply walks to my side and leans down, his mouth close to my ear.

“We have a problem.”

The words are quiet, but the weight behind them is not. Andrei has been with me for eight years. He’s seen men beaten, operations collapsed, entire networks dismantled by federal investigations. He doesn’t interrupt meetings for problems. He interrupts them for emergencies.

I hold up a hand. The presentation stops.

“Gentlemen, we’ll resume in one hour.”

The three men exchange glances. They’re confused, but they know better than to question me. They file out of the room with murmured acknowledgments, leaving me alone with Ivan, Kirill, and Andrei.

I turn to my second in command. “Talk.”

“The secondary financial network. Someone’s inside, but this time they mean business.”

I’m already moving. Kirill and Ivan follow as I stride down the hallway toward the security hub—a reinforced room in the east wing of the estate that houses our primary monitoring systems. The walls are lined with screens displaying real-time data from our networks, and the air smells like electronics and stale coffee. Three of my analysts are at their stations, their faces illuminated by the glow of their monitors.

“Show me,” I say.

This is the second time in as many weeks. What the hell is going on?

One of the analysts pulls up the intrusion log. The data scrolls across the main screen, and I study it while the room holds its breath around me.

The breach is precise. That’s the first thing I notice. Not the scattered, opportunistic probing of an amateur looking for anything valuable, but a focused incursion targeting specific nodes in our financial routing layer. The hacker moved through our outer defenses without triggering alarms, navigated our mid-level security like they had a map, and settled into our restricted systems with the confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were looking for.

“Duration?” I ask.

“Approximately eighteen hours so far,” the analyst says. “They entered yesterday morning and have been active since.”

That’s not a smash-and-grab. That’s someone who has the patience to sit inside our systems, explore, and extract data methodically.

“What have they accessed?”

“Financial routing structures, offshore account patterns, and some transaction histories. They’ve been moving through the restricted layers, but they haven’t touched anything that would compromise our operational security. No personnel files.”

I process this. The hacker has been inside our most sensitive financial systems for hours, and they’ve only taken money trails. Not the information that would bring law enforcement to our doors. Not the data that would expose our people or our methods. Just the money.

“Are they still active?”