I did not rush. I did not cry. I simply knelt on the cold, veined marble and began folding my silk blouses, placing them back into the bruised leather of my suitcase. The silence in the grand foyer was absolute, save for the ragged, heavy breathing of my father, whose face was flushed a dangerous, mottled crimson.

“We comb through the employee manifests,” I ordered. “Anyone who had access to the European expansion plans gets audited. We find the leak.”

David shook his head. “I already did. The leak isn’t internal. The vulnerability they are exploiting is based on legacy blueprints. Specifically, the expansion models drawn up during your father’s tenure.”

The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.

“Arthur is in a maximum-security federal penitentiary,” I said coldly. “He doesn’t have access to a cell phone, let alone the capital to orchestrate a billion-dollar supply chain chokehold.”

“No,” David agreed. “But someone else from the old regime does. Someone who was in the room when those blueprints were drafted, who has an axe to grind, and who conveniently vanished after you dissolved the board.”

I looked up at him, the pieces snapping into place. “Richard Vance.”

Richard Vance. The former board member who had played golf with my father every Sunday. The man I had unceremoniously fired and stripped of his golden parachute. He had narrowly avoided prison by turning state’s evidence against Arthur, claiming ignorance of the outright fraud while admitting to negligence. He had paid a massive fine, retreated from the public eye, and supposedly retired to the French Riviera.

“If Vance is running Vanguard Apex,” I murmured, “he’s doing it with capital he hid from the feds. And he’s doing it to destroy the company he believes I stole from him.”

“We can’t prove it,” David said. “And until we can, we can’t stop him from legally acquiring those supply lines. In sixty days, they trigger the monopoly clauses, and our European servers go dark. We’ll lose billions, and the stock will tank.”

“There has to be a paper trail linking Vance to Vanguard,” I said, standing up and walking to the window. “A man like Richard doesn’t use his own hands. He uses proxies. He uses offshore accounts. Who was his fixer?”

“I don’t know,” David admitted. “We’ve hit a dead end.”

I stared out at the sprawling metropolis below. There was only one person alive who knew the intricate, dirty secrets of Richard Vance’s financial networks. Only one person who had been arrogant enough to share a boardroom, a country club, and a criminal enterprise with him.

“Get my jet ready,” I said, turning back to David.

“Where are we going?”

“Colorado,” I replied. “I need to visit an old friend.”

The Federal Correctional Institution in Florence, Colorado, is a bleak, brutalist monument to human failure. Surrounded by high desert and ringed by miles of razor wire, it strips away the humanity of everyone who steps inside.

I wore a simple black cashmere coat and flat boots. No jewelry. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing the wealth I had accumulated, nor did I want to appear as the glittering CEO he so deeply resented. I just wanted to be the executioner returning for a final question.

The visitation room was sterile, reeking of industrial bleach and stale sweat. I sat at a metal table bolted to the concrete floor, separated from the inmate side by a thick pane of reinforced plexiglass. A telephone receiver hung on the wall next to me.

Ten minutes later, the heavy steel door on the opposite side clanged open.

Arthur Sterling shuffled into the room.

If I hadn’t known it was him, I would not have recognized the man. The Arthur I knew was a titan of bluster, a man who commanded rooms with a booming voice and a perfectly tailored Italian suit. The creature sitting across from me was a hollowed-out husk. He had lost at least forty pounds. His skin was the color of old parchment, hanging loosely from his cheekbones. His hair was completely white, shaved close to the scalp. The orange jumpsuit hung on him like a shroud.

He sat down heavily on the metal stool, his trembling hands resting on the counter. He looked at me through the smudged plexiglass, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock, terror, and a pathetic, desperate spark of hope.

He picked up his receiver. I picked up mine.

“Elara,” his voice was a raspy, broken whisper. It crackled through the cheap plastic speaker. “You came.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Arthur,” I said, my voice perfectly flat. “This isn’t a social call. I need a piece of information.”

The desperate hope in his eyes curdled into a dark, familiar bitterness. He let out a dry, coughing laugh. “Of course. You’ve been gone three years. Not a letter. Not a word to your lawyers. You let me rot in this concrete box, and now you want something from me? The great Elara Sterling, crawling back to the father she destroyed?”

“I didn’t destroy you,” I corrected him calmly. “Your greed destroyed you. I just provided the consequences. And I am certainly not crawling. I am offering a transaction.”

He narrowed his eyes, leaning closer to the glass. “What kind of transaction?”

“Richard Vance,” I said.

Arthur flinched. The name clearly struck a nerve. He glanced nervously at the guard standing by the door, then lowered his voice. “What about him?”

“He’s orchestrating a hostile squeeze on my European supply chains through a proxy firm in Luxembourg. Vanguard Apex. He’s using capital he hid from the SEC during the fallout.” I watched Arthur’s face carefully. “You know how he hides his money. You two used the same fixers for a decade. I need the name of the intermediary Vance uses in Europe. The bagman who sets up the shell companies.”

Arthur stared at me, a slow, malicious grin spreading across his gaunt face. It was a grotesque echo of the arrogant man he used to be. For the first time in three years, he felt like he had leverage.

“So, the little genius is in trouble,” he sneered softly. “Vance is strangling your servers, and you can’t find the valve. You want me to hand you the knife to cut him down.”