Chapter 3 3

The elevator doors opened into the lobby. The doorman, a man named Henry who usually looked through Elease as if she were invisible, blinked in surprise.

He saw the canvas bag. He saw the hoodie.

"Calling the town car, Mrs. Stephens?" Henry asked, his hand hovering over the phone.

"Ms. Finch," Elease corrected without breaking stride. "And no."

She pushed through the revolving doors and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

The noise of Manhattan hit her instantly. Horns blaring, sirens wailing, the low hum of millions of people moving. It was chaotic. It was perfect.

She walked to the curb and pulled out her phone.

Her fingers flew across the screen. She wasn't opening a social media app. She was accessing a hidden partition in the operating system.

The colorful interface vanished, replaced by a black terminal screen with scrolling green text.

SkyNet Protocol: Active.

She typed in a command string. She pinged a secure offshore server located in the Cayman Islands.

The query wasn't a balance check. It was an execution command. Phoenix rerouted a fraction of a percent of global high-frequency trades through a ghost algorithm, simultaneously draining three dark web escrow accounts belonging to arms dealers. It took twelve seconds.

The result appeared on the screen.

New Account Balance: $500,000,000.00

These were not funds from a past life. They were the spoils of a war she had just started. They were untraceable, liquid, and entirely hers. They had been sitting dormant in the dark corners of the web, waiting for a predator like her to claim them.

She didn't transfer it all. That would trigger flags at the NSA.

She activated a sub-routine to funnel a stream of cash into a generic, untraceable spending account. She set the limit: one hundred thousand dollars a day.

She closed the terminal and opened a ride-share app. She spoofed her GPS location to bounce off three different satellites, making her digital footprint a ghost.

A black SUV pulled up to the curb thirty seconds later. It was a priority dispatch she had hacked into the queue.

High above, on the penthouse balcony, Kason Stephens was watching.

He gripped the railing. He expected to see her crying on the bench. He expected her to look lost.

Instead, he saw her open the door of a premium SUV. She moved with a military-straight posture. She didn't look back. Not once.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out.

"Darling, I'm almost there," Chelsea's voice purred through the speaker.

Kason felt a sudden wave of irritation. "Fine," he snapped, and hung up. He stared at the spot where the SUV had been, a strange unease settling in his gut.

Inside the car, the air was cool and quiet. The tinted windows turned the city into a dark, moving blur.

Elease caught her reflection in the glass.

The scar on her cheek was jagged, pink and white against her pale skin. It pulled at the corner of her eye. It was the result of a "kitchen accident" when she was twelve-an accident orchestrated by her step-sister, Fannye.

She touched the scar. Her skin was cool.

"First order of business," she whispered to herself. "Fix the hardware."

She typed a query into her phone: Bio-gel synthesis materials. Supplier: Dark Web.

The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He saw a woman in a hoodie with a scarred face. His expression remained professionally neutral, his eyes meeting hers for only a fraction of a second before returning to the road.

"Destination?"

"The Pierre Hotel," Elease said. She needed neutral ground. She needed luxury. She needed a fortress.

Her phone vibrated again.

The screen lit up. Caller ID: Father.

Elease stared at the name. Franklin Finch.

She let it ring.

The phone went silent, then beeped for a voicemail.

She didn't dial into the voicemail system. She accessed the audio file directly through the terminal, playing it at 2x speed.

Franklin's voice was venomous, distorted by the speed but clear in its intent.

"If you ruined the deal with Kason, don't bother coming home. You are useless to me if you aren't his wife."

Elease smirked. It was a dark, dangerous expression.

"Home?" she said to the empty car. "No. I'm coming to a battlefield."

The SUV merged into the heavy traffic, leaving the Stephens empire behind in the dust.