They branded me a fraud in a courtroom overflowing with onlookers, and my own mother ensured everyone present swallowed it as gospel. With her palm pressed flat against the Bible, she met the judge’s stare and stated, “She was never an operative. The wounds, the commendations, every single piece of it was a complete fabrication.”

I didn't call the police. You don't call the local police on the Volkov Group. You call the ghosts.

An hour later, I sat in the subterranean level of the Apex building—a heavily reinforced bunker my paranoid father had built during the height of the Cold War. The security feeds were wiped clean. Nikolai and his men had been zip-tied and tossed into a delivery van in the alleyway for their syndicate friends to find.

I picked up an encrypted satellite phone and dialed a secure number that hadn't existed on any official grid for five years.

It rang exactly twice.

"I heard you made CEO," Marcus Thorne’s voice crackled over the secure line. "Congratulations. How is the corporate world treating you?"

"I need a massive favor, Director," I said, booting up the bunker's mainframe computer. "Julian sold me out to the Volkov Syndicate. They just tried to hit me in my own office."

A heavy, dangerous silence fell over the line. When Thorne spoke again, the paternal warmth was entirely gone, replaced by the lethal pragmatism of a black-site commander.

"Volkov. They operate out of the abandoned shipping yards in Bay Ridge. If they tried to hit you once, they won't stop until they get the drone blueprints. Or your head on a pike."

"I'm not hiding," I said, my fingers flying across the keyboard, hacking into Apex's own security grid to lay a digital trap. "My father built this company to protect this country. I'm not letting a group of rogue mercenaries tear it down for parts."

"What do you need?" Thorne asked.

"I need you to leak a rumor. On the dark web," I said, pulling up the architectural schematics of my own building. "Tell them the new CEO is moving the physical blueprints out of the Apex vault tomorrow night at midnight. Just me, and two low-level security guards."