I was raising my champagne glass when our maid burst into the ballroom, pale and shaking. “Don’t eat the cake!” she screamed. “She poisoned it!” Every head turned toward my billionaire father’s fiancée, whose perfect smile instantly vanished. She pointed at the maid. “She’s lying!” I quietly set down my fork and pulled out my phone. “Funny,” I said. “Because I recorded what you put in it.” And that was only the beginning of my revenge.

"Marcus, can you disarm the pressure plate?!" I yelled over the piercing shrill of the countdown alarm.

*75 SECONDS.*

"Not in seventy seconds!" Marcus yelled back, dropping to his knees, his hands trembling as he used a fine ceramic blade to trace the hairline tripwire. "It’s a dual-redundant circuit! If I cut the primary without grounding the secondary, the thermite detonates instantly!"

"Then leave the drive!" Detective Cole shouted, kicking frantically against the reinforced solid-oak master bedroom doors. "The doors are magnetic-drop deadbolts! We need an explosive breach!"

"Cole, get back!" I commanded.

I looked around the room. On the antique marble fireplace stood two heavy, solid-brass decorative urns weighing at least thirty pounds each.

"Marcus! What is the exact weight trigger on that plate?" I asked, adrenaline sharpening my vision until everything seemed to move in slow motion.

"Approximately four hundred grams! Why?!"

"Because we don't disarm it. We replace it!"

I rushed to the vanity table, grabbing Victoria's heavy crystal perfume decanter and a velvet jewelry box packed with gold watches.

*45 SECONDS.*

"Marcus, hold the plate steady with your blade! I’m going to slide the weight onto the contact switch the moment you lift the drive!"

"Evelyn, if your timing is off by a millisecond, we vaporize!" Marcus screamed.

"Do it now!" I roared.

Marcus took a ragged breath. His eyes met mine. On the count of three, his left hand swept the cold storage drive upward while my hands slammed the crystal decanter and leaded velvet box down onto the recessed copper plate.

*Click.*

The mechanism held. The countdown didn't accelerate.

"Go! The skylight!" Cole bellowed, firing three rounds into the mechanical latch of the ceiling access ladder.

*20 SECONDS.*

We sprinted up the steel rungs, bursting out onto the wet tar of the townhouse roof just as the digital timer struck zero.

A muffled, terrifying *CRACK* vibrated beneath our feet. An intense flash of blinding white light shot out from the fifth-floor windows as the thermite charges burned through steel girders and concrete floors with three-thousand-degree fury. The upper structure of the historic home began to groan and sag inward.

We leapt across the four-foot alleyway gap onto the adjoining brownstone roof, tumbling hard against the gravel just as the roof of the Ashford townhouse collapsed into a towering plume of black smoke and ash.

I lay on my back, coughing, clutching the black cold storage hard drive tightly against my chest.

Cole pulled himself up, bleeding from a scratch on his cheek, staring back at the inferno. "Jesus Christ... she wasn't kidding. These monsters are playing for total annihilation."

I stood up, wiping the soot from my face. My coat was torn, my hands burned, but my eyes were blazing with pure, lethal fire.

"Marcus," I said, handing him the hard drive. "Plug it into your satellite terminal right now."

Marcus sat against the brick parapet, cracking open his encrypted laptop and connecting the high-speed data transfer cables. The drive initialized with a high-pitched whine. Thousands of encrypted folders began decrypting automatically, cascading down his screen in emerald cascades of raw data.

"Evelyn..." Marcus gasped, his eyes scanning the decrypted banking transcripts. "This isn't just Julianna and Nikolai. Triton Capital was funded by a shadow consortium of twelve billionaire investors across Europe and Wall Street. They’ve been shorting Ashford stock for nine months. Today's board takeover was supposed to net them four billion dollars in pure profit by four o'clock today."

"Where is Julianna Vance holding the victory celebration?" I asked, my voice deadly cold.

Marcus tapped three keys. "The penthouse floor of the St. Regis Hotel. The consortium is hosting a private shareholder signing ceremony right now to finalize the transfer of your father’s voting shares."