Chapter 3

I stumbled back into my bedroom and slammed the door. My body trembled, not from fear, but from a rage so profound it felt like it would burn me alive from the inside out.

He controlled everything.

The words echoed in my mind. He was right. In my first life, I had tried to fight him on his terms. I had screamed, I had pleaded, I had tried to appeal to a sense of justice that he simply did not possess.

It got me killed.

I stared at my reflection in the vanity mirror. The face looking back was pale, her eyes wide with a trauma no one else could see. The naive, trusting girl who had walked into her wedding day like a lamb to the slaughter was gone. She had died on that dark, wet road.

I was what was left.

A cold calm settled over me. If I couldn't fight him on his terms, I would fight him on mine. If he wanted to control the Vance family, then there would be no Vance family left to control.

Scorched earth. That was the only way.

I kicked the leg of the antique vanity, the wood splintering under the force of my heel. A sharp pain shot up my leg, but it was a good pain. A real pain. It grounded me.

They thought my mother's legacy was just the houses, the stocks, the endless river of old money. They were wrong. Her true legacy was her mind. A brilliant, strategic mind that saw the world as a chessboard. And she had taught me how to play.

She had also known her husband. She had known the man she married was a snake.

I walked to my bookshelf, my movements precise and deliberate. I pulled out a first edition of "The Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, my mother's favorite. My fingers found the hidden latch on the spine. The book's cover opened not to pages, but to a small, hidden compartment.

Inside was a single, encrypted flash drive. A failsafe. My mother had called it her "in case of Richard" file.

I sat at my desk and plugged the drive into my laptop. The screen lit up with a single password prompt.

I typed the phrase my mother had drilled into me since I was a child, the motto of her philanthropic foundation, the core of her entire being.

"Justice is the only non-negotiable asset."

The drive unlocked.

It was all there. Years of meticulous documentation. Offshore accounts, illegal campaign contributions, backroom deals, bribery schemes. A vast network of corruption with Senator Richard Thorne at its very center. It was a dossier so damning it wouldn't just end his career; it would send him to federal prison for the rest of his life.

In my first life, I never knew it existed. I had been too trusting, too blind.

This time, I would use it.

I opened a new browser window, navigating to an encrypted, untraceable email service. I attached the dossier. I addressed it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI's Public Corruption Unit, and the investigative desks of every major news outlet in the country.

In the body of the email, I typed a single, anonymous line.

"Justice is the only non-negotiable asset."

My finger hovered over the send button. This would destroy the Vance name. It would create a scandal that would tarnish my mother's memory. It was the nuclear option.

But it was the only option I had left.

I clicked send. The email vanished into the digital ether. There was no going back.

A grim smile touched my lips. The game had changed. And they didn't even know they were playing.