Chapter 4

The ride home was a silent, suffocating ordeal. The air in the limo was thick with my family's un-spoken rage. The moment we stepped through the front door, it erupted.

"How dare you!" my father bellowed, his face contorted. "You deliberately humiliated Maya! You humiliated this entire family in front of Elias Sterling!"

"I spoke to him about quantum computing," I said calmly. "He was interested. He offered me a job. How is that a humiliation?"

"You know exactly what you did!" my mother cried, her hands clenched into fists. "You couldn't stand to see Maya getting the attention, so you had to pull that ridiculous stunt with the data wall! It was a pathetic, desperate cry for attention!"

Maya, of course, was weeping softly into Ethan's shoulder. "I... I just wanted us all to have a nice evening," she sobbed. "I thought he liked my music."

He was supposed to be my ticket. My key to the inner circle. She stole him from me. But it doesn't matter. I have other allies. And I will make her life a living hell, her mind-voice snarled.

"You are grounded," my father declared. "You will not be going to Sterling's office tomorrow. You will not be taking that job. You will stay in your room until you learn to have some respect for this family."

In my first life, this would have been the end. I would have been locked away, and Maya would have found a way to take my place at Sterling's side.

I simply raised an eyebrow.

"You're going to call Elias Sterling, the most influential man in the tech world, and tell him that your twenty-year-old daughter can't come to a job meeting because you've grounded her?" I asked. "Go ahead. Make the call. I'm sure he'll be very understanding. It will do wonders for the company's stock price when the news gets out that Thompson Innovations is run by a man who gives his head of AI development a time-out."

My father's mouth opened, then closed. He had no response. The logic was unassailable. He was a businessman above all else, and he knew I was right. His authority, which he wielded like a club, was useless against this.

He just stood there, impotent and seething.

"I'll be leaving at 8:30," I said, turning to go upstairs. "Don't be late," I added to the silent driver who I knew was waiting.

I slept soundly. The next morning, I came downstairs in the same black pantsuit. My family was at the breakfast table, pointedly ignoring me. I poured myself a coffee and walked out the front door. The town car was nowhere in sight. I saw it parked at the far end of the long driveway, by the main gate, clearly instructed to make me wait or miss my appointment.

I smirked. Pathetic.

I pulled out my phone and used an app I'd designed to summon a self-driving vehicle from a premier subscription service I maintained. Less than two minutes later, a sleek, black electric car with no driver pulled silently up the driveway and stopped in front of me.

As I got in, I glanced back at the house. I could see their four shocked faces in the dining room window. Their little plan, so easily thwarted. They were thinking in terms of grounded teenagers. I was thinking in terms of logistics and infrastructure. We weren't even playing the same game anymore.

Idiots, I thought to myself as the car sped away. They're so blinded by their own petty emotions they can't even see the real threats.

I arrived at Sterling Tower with ten minutes to spare. It was a marvel of modern architecture, a gleaming spire of glass and steel. As I walked into the lobby, I saw something that made my blood run cold.

Maya was already there.

She wasn't alone. She was standing next to a handsome, impeccably dressed man in his late twenties. He had a slick, predatory charm that set all my internal alarms ringing.

Julian Croft.

In my first life, Julian was the ambitious and corrupt head of Sterling's R&D department. He had become Maya's most devoted ally and accomplice. He saw her as a kindred spirit, another beautiful predator. Together, they had orchestrated my downfall and the systematic dismantling of my family's company. He had been the one to plant the final, damning piece of fake evidence on my personal server.

Seeing them together now, laughing intimately, confirmed my worst fears. Maya hadn't just been relying on my family. She was already rebuilding the same network of allies that had destroyed me once before.

Maya saw me and her smile widened. She whispered something to Julian, and he turned to look at me. His eyes swept over me with open contempt, a dismissive sneer on his lips.

The danger I was in had just magnified tenfold. This wasn't just about my family anymore. This was a conspiracy, and I had just walked right into the middle of it.