Chapter 4

My new role at Davenport Holdings was a gilded cage, but it came with keys.

High-level security clearance meant access to internal networks I could only dream of before.

Marc fed me leads, suspicious financial trails, names of shell corporations.

Dylan was given a token role in the company, mostly to keep him out of trouble.

He resented my presence, my influence with Cassie.

He' d scowl at me in meetings, make snide remarks. I ignored him.

During a tense board meeting about a struggling subsidiary, Dylan tried to interject with a half-baked, arrogant proposal.

The board members exchanged polite, strained smiles.

Cassie gently tried to steer the conversation back on track.

Suddenly, Dylan clutched his chest, his face paling.

"I... I don' t feel right," he gasped, his breath shallow.

A stark reminder of his dependency on Sarah' s stolen organ.

Cassie was instantly at his side, her face etched with worry.

"Dylan! What is it? Someone get water! Call Dr. Ramirez!"

The meeting dissolved into chaos.

Cassie was completely focused on Dylan, barking orders, her phone pressed to her ear.

This was my chance.

I' d discovered a zero-day exploit in the custom security software Cassie used for her most private server, the one separate from the main corporate network.

While everyone was distracted by Dylan's medical drama, I slipped out of the boardroom and made my way to Cassie' s main office.

Her personal terminal was locked, but the server itself was in a reinforced closet.

The exploit gave me remote administrative access, but I still needed to bypass her final layers of encryption.

My fingers flew across my own secured laptop, connected discreetly to a port I' d prepped.

One password remained.

I tried her birthday. No. Anniversary. No.

Then, a cold certainty.

Sarah' s death date.

I typed it in.

Access granted.

My heart hammered, not from fear, but from grim satisfaction.

Files upon files.

Detailed communications between Cassie and Dr. Evelyn Hayes, planning the organ procurement with chilling efficiency.

Offshore account numbers, transfers, payments for "medical consultation" that ran into millions.

Falsified medical data trails, showing how Sarah was declared brain-dead under highly questionable circumstances at the Davenport-funded hospital.

And the worst: links to an international organ trafficking ring, operating through one of Davenport Holdings' obscure shell corporations. They hadn't just taken Sarah's organs for Dylan; they were players in a much larger, darker game.

I exfiltrated everything, terabytes of data, to an encrypted drive.

Just as the final file copied, I heard Cassie' s voice in the hallway, sharp and anxious, still dealing with Dylan' s episode.

I disconnected, wiped my tracks, and slipped back towards the chaos around the boardroom, my expression carefully neutral.

The smoking gun wasn't just smoking. It was a raging inferno.