The phone felt like a block of ice in my hand. I stared at the image, my mind racing through the technical possibilities. It was a shot from my own hallway camera. A camera I had encrypted personally.
I didn't panic. I didn't scream.
Instead, I slid my thumb across the screen, opening a hidden diagnostic app. My eyes narrowed as I saw the truth: a "Ghost" protocol had been installed directly onto my hardware. This wasn't a remote hack. Someone had physically touched my server.
"Mommy?"
Leo's voice was small and trembling. I looked up to see his nanny running toward him, her face mirrored with the same confusion and fear I was trying to mask.
I didn't look at him yet; I couldn't let him see the cold fury in my eyes. "Leo, you and Mary go into the laundry room and crawl behind the dryer. It's a game of hide-and-seek, okay? Don't come out until I say 'Scalpel.'"
He nodded, clutching his lion, and scurried off with the nanny. The second he was out of sight, I moved.
I didn't call the police. In this world, the police were just a slower version of the mafia. I walked to the hallway camera, grabbed a chair, and stood on it. With a quick twist, I ripped the casing off. There it was—a tiny, unauthorized bypass chip soldered directly onto the board.
My security team. Those "elite" guards I paid six figures to. They hadn't just been lazy; they had been complicit.
The front door lock clicked.
It was a soft sound—the sound of someone using a master key. My "biometric" locks were being bypassed by the very people who installed them. I didn't retreat. I stepped down from the chair, my hand finding the heavy glass award on the console table.
The door swung open. A man in my own security uniform stepped in, a silenced pistol in his hand. He wasn't looking for a conversation.
I didn't give him the chance to find one.
As he crossed the threshold, I swung the award with every bit of suppressed rage I had for the Reed family and the world that had stolen my life. It caught him across the temple. He went down with a muffled groan. I didn't wait for him to get up. I grabbed the pistol from his hand, flicked the safety off—a move I'd learned in a dark basement in Sicily years ago—and kicked the door shut, deadbolting it manually.
Now, and only now, did I pick up my phone. I dialed the number I had vowed never to touch. It rang once.
"Asher," I said, my voice as steady as it was when I held a beating heart in my hands.
"Chloe?" His voice was thick with irritation. "Is everything alrigh—"
"I'm at my penthouse," I interrupted, stepping over the unconscious guard to check the hallway feed on my tablet. "If you ever send even one more person around my house again, I swear I will kill him. Come and get your puppet. I have one of my guards unconscious on my floor and a bypass chip on my cameras."
"What the hell are you talking about, Chloe?" he asked, a noticeable edge of irritation in his voice.
"You mean you did not send anyone to watch over Leo and me?"
There was a sudden, violent silence on the other end. I could hear the gears turning in his head as the realization hit him.
"Wait a minute," he said, his voice dropping into a deadly, low register. "Someone broke into your penthouse? They're coming for Leo?"
The sound of a chair crashing echoed through the line. "Don't move. I'm—"
"I'm not moving," I snapped. "I'm defending my son. But your people are the ones who put a target on this building. If you want to see your 'flesh and blood' alive, you have three minutes to get to the 54th floor—if you are within reach—before I start clearing the rest of this hallway myself."
I hung up before he could respond. I didn't need his permission, and I certainly didn't need his protection. I just needed him to do his job as the monster so I could keep being the mother.
I walked back toward the laundry room, the weight of the gun familiar and cold in my hand. "Leo?" I whispered. "Still hiding?"
"Scalpel?" his tiny voice asked from behind the dryer.
"Not yet, baby," I said, my eyes fixed on the front door as the handle began to turn again. "Not yet."
**********