Chapter 16 - The Voice from the Dead
Dante powered on the laptop. Its blue screen reflected in the dark glass of the kitchen window, casting a surgical glow across his sharp features. He plugged a specialized decryption dongle into the port and began typing furiously, entering complex alphanumeric strings from memory.
"What are you doing?" I asked, watching his fingers fly across the keys.
"Julianna didn't steal that ledger for money," Dante muttered, his eyes tracking lines of green code scrolling down the monitor. "Julianna was terrified. Two weeks before our anniversary, she came to my private office at Moretti Tower. She tried to warn me."
My breath caught in my throat. "Warn you about what?"
"She told me my mother was meeting with Victor Sinclair—the head of the Sinclair syndicate," Dante said, his voice dropping into a dark, hollow cadence. "She said they were planning a hostile acquisition that involved staging an internal scandal to force me out. But I was so arrogant back then... I thought I was untouchable. I accused Julianna of trying to drive a wedge between me and the board. I threw her out of my office."
Dante hit the enter key. A series of progress bars flashed across the screen, followed by an audio playback file labeled *J.V._FINAL_LOG.wav*.
"Before Julianna left for Europe," Dante continued, "she sent an encrypted ping to my private offshore server. It had a dead-man's trigger. If she failed to check in for seventy-two hours, the file would unlock."
He pressed play.
A woman's voice, ragged, breathless, and filled with static, filled our small kitchen. The sound of rain beating against metal echoed in the background.
*"Dante... if you're hearing this, Harrison found me. Or your mother did. It doesn't matter, they're the same beast now. Listen to me carefully. The kiss at the anniversary gala... Eleanor forced me. She had my brother locked in a private clinic in upstate New York. She threatened to cut his life support if I didn't stage that scene in front of Lena."*
My knees felt weak. I grabbed the back of a wooden chair to keep from falling.
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*"The ledger isn't just overseas assets, Dante,"* Julianna’s voice sobbed through the speaker, growing more frantic. *"It’s a murder contract. Eleanor didn't build the Moretti empire with your father. She had your father poisoned fifteen years ago when he tried to divorce her and leave the trust to you and the children you would have. The clause... Section 14... your father wrote it to protect you from her! But Eleanor altered the Cook County filing after he died. Mateo’s DNA doesn't unlock the money... it unlocks the forensic evidence your father hid in the Zurich depository!"*
A loud screech of tires, a violent crunch of metal, and the audio cut into deafening white noise.
