The metallic taste of iron flooded my mouth. I used my tongue to press my torn cheek against my teeth, locking away the sob before it could claw its way up my throat. In front of me, Valeria Mendoza was still frozen in her triumphant pose, her fingers curled slightly from the impact, her chest rising and falling beneath the expensive cream blazer. She looked less like a woman who had just committed assault in a municipal building and more like an actress taking a curtain call.

“…I don’t care about the federal task force, Alejandro! Get the offshore wire confirmation processed before the morning audit cycle hits Zurich!”

The voice was unmistakable. Raspy, arrogant, and dripping with absolute entitlement. Richard Mendoza.

And then, a second voice answered—younger, panicked, and strained to its absolute breaking point.

“Dad, I’m trying! But the encryption protocol is locking me out! Whoever set up this trust account put a multi-sig kill-switch on the root directory—I can’t authorize the transfer without the primary administrative token!”

Alejandro.

My breath hitched. They were together. The fugitive father-in-law who had faked a heart condition to escape federal custody, and the pathetic, disgraced former husband who had lost his firm, his social standing, and his freedom, now reduced to acting as an errand boy for a sinking criminal syndicate.

I didn’t hesitate. I raised my foot and kicked the reinforced steel door with all my might.

Bang!

The door slammed against the interior drywall with a deafening crash, bouncing wide open.

Inside, the makeshift office was a disaster area. Three high-end computer monitors glowed aggressively under harsh fluorescent work-lights, displaying streams of financial code, offshore routing charts, and bank wire logs.

Richard Mendoza spun around in his ergonomic office chair, his face pale, his silver hair disheveled, clutching a heavy ceramic coffee mug as if he meant to throw it.

Beside him, sitting frantically at the main keyboard, was Alejandro. He looked like a skeleton wrapped in an expensive suit; his cheeks were hollow, his eyes wild and bloodshot, staring at me as if he had just seen a ghost crawled straight out of a nightmare.

“Elena…” Alejandro whispered, his fingers freezing over the keyboard. “How… how did you find us?”

Richard recovered his composure with terrifying speed. He slammed the coffee mug down on the metal desk, a thin, cruel smirk twisting his aging face. He didn’t look like a fugitive on the run; he looked like a predator who had just cornered a wounded animal.

“Well, well,” Richard sneered, slowly standing up from his chair and adjusting the cuffs of his rumpled dress shirt. “The little freelance graphic designer turned federal informant. You know, Elena, when the marshals told us you had skipped town with seventy million dollars of government whistleblower money, I thought you’d have the good sense to hide out in Europe. Not come waltzing into a basement in Portland like a cheap television detective.”

“It’s thirty million, Richard, not seventy,” I corrected coldly, stepping fully into the room, my hand resting firmly in my coat pocket around the heavy brass paperweight. “And I didn’t hide. I audit. And right now, I’m auditing a pair of pathetic rats trying to sink a ship that has already hit the bottom of the ocean.”

Alejandro stood up slowly from his chair, his hands trembling violently. “Elena, please… you have to listen to us. My father… he forced me. When I got out on probation appeal, he contacted me, he said we could fix everything, we could get the money back from the Caymans and start over in South America—”

“Shut up, you spineless fool!” Richard snapped, backhanding Alejandro across the face with enough force to send him stumbling back against the computer terminal.

Alejandro clutched his cheek, a red mark blooming across his skin, but he didn’t fight back. He just cowered, looking at his father with a mixture of terror and bitter resentment.

“She’s alone, Alejandro!” Richard hissed, glaring at me with venomous hatred. “There are no federal agents outside. There is no backup. She walked right into a slaughterhouse because she couldn’t mind her own damn business!”

Richard reached into his breast pocket.

My instincts screamed. I didn’t wait to see if he was pulling a gun or a knife. I whipped my hand out of my coat pocket, gripped the heavy brass surveyor’s compass, and hurled it across the room with every ounce of strength I possessed.

Clang!

The heavy brass object caught Richard squarely across his right wrist as his hand cleared his jacket. He let out a sharp, agonized shriek, dropping a heavy black pistol onto the concrete floor with a metallic clatter.

Before he could lunge for the weapon, I closed the distance between us, my boots sliding across the slick concrete. I vaulted over the metal desk, grabbed the master server cable connected to the main computer terminal, and ripped it out of the wall socket with a shower of blue sparks.

The screens went black instantly. The room plunged into a suffocating, dead silence, broken only by the heavy, ragged breathing of the three of us standing in the dark.

“The servers are dead, Richard,” I said, my voice echoing off the concrete walls. “The local network is locked. The federal backup cache synced my location the second I breached your subnet five minutes ago. Thomas and a tactical unit of U.S. Marshals are already pulling into the upper parking ramp.”

Richard clutched his bruised wrist, his face twisted in an ugly, defeated snarl. He looked around the dark room as if searching for an invisible exit that wasn’t there.

Alejandro sank slowly to his knees on the floor, burying his face in his hands, and began to sob. Not the quiet, dignified weeping of a remorseful man, but the high-pitched, pathetic wailing of someone who finally realized that no amount of money, no fancy suit, and no family name could ever save him from the consequences of his own cowardice.

“You ruined us,” Alejandro choked out through his fingers, rocking back and forth on the concrete. “You ruined everything.”

I looked down at my former husband—the man who had treated me like furniture, who had watched another woman strike my face outside a courthouse and told me to let it go.

“No, Alejandro,” I said softly, turning my back on him and walking toward the door as the distant, rising siren of federal cruisers began to wail down the street above us. “I didn’t ruin you. I just finally balanced the books.”