I was washing the car when my ten-year-old son screamed from somewhere inside the house.

Elena didn’t flinch. She slowly placed her wine glass on the table, a cold, amused smile spreading across her face. Richard, however, scrambled backward, his face draining of color.

“Mark,” Elena said, her voice smooth. “You look terrible. The fugitive life doesn't suit you.”

“Get on the ground,” I ordered, my hands shaking with adrenaline.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” She stood up, smoothing her sweater. “You don’t have the stomach for it. You never did. That’s why I had to leave. You were suffocatingly ordinary.”

“You faked your death. You let me mourn you. You let Leo cry himself to sleep for a year!” I yelled, stepping closer.

“I secured his future! I took fifty million from a corrupt hedge fund, Mark. If I had stayed, they would have killed us all. I did what I had to do to survive, and now I have an empire. I want my son to inherit it.”

“He’s not a prince, Elena. He’s a boy. And you’re a monster.”

Richard reached for his jacket. I pivoted, firing a warning shot that shattered a vase an inch from his head. The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space. “Hands where I can see them, Richard!”

Elena’s eyes narrowed. “You think you’ve won because you found me? The local police are on my payroll. My security team is rushing here right now because of that gunshot. You’re going to die here, Mark, and Leo will be mine.”

She was stalling. I could hear the heavy boots of her private security forces echoing down the hallway.

“I didn't come here to kill you, Elena,” I said, pulling out a small remote detonator I had rigged from a garage door opener. “I came to destroy you.”

Before I left the server room, I had placed three blocks of thermite—bought from the same dark-web contacts I used to get the passports—directly onto her mainframe servers. The servers that held every dime of her stolen fifty million dollars, all in untraceable cryptocurrency wallets.