My husband forced me to endure fifty strikes of a leather riding crop while his new favorite sat close by, casually sipping her wine and keeping tally.

We relocated to a secure, off-the-grid safehouse in the Swiss Alps, a property completely disconnected from the Vanguard financial grid. While a private physician tended to my father’s gunshot wound, I spent three days digging through the encrypted files we had managed to salvage from the estate servers.

I was looking for anything related to my mother and the economic summit in Geneva.

Late on the third night, I cracked an ancient, heavily partitioned file buried under my mother’s maiden name. It wasn't a financial ledger. It was a diary.

August 12th, 2005, the entry read. Marcus doesn't know. He thinks I’m attending charity galas, but I’m getting closer to the core of the Syndicate. They are planning to artificially crash the European housing market to seize localized assets. The Director is someone close to us. Someone Marcus trusts blindly. I have the evidence on a microdrive. If I don't make it back from Paris, the key is hidden in Evelyn’s music box.

I froze. I sprinted into my bedroom and dug through my travel bag. I had brought the small, wooden music box my mother had given me as a child; it was the only piece of her I carried everywhere.

I smashed the wooden box against the stone fireplace. Amidst the shattered wood and broken gears, a tiny silver USB drive clattered onto the hearth.

I plugged it into my laptop. The decryption took twenty minutes. When the files finally opened, a high-resolution photograph filled the screen. It was a picture of a man shaking hands with a known international arms dealer.

I stared at the screen, all the breath leaving my lungs.