MY MIL KICKED ME OUT FOR HER PREGNANT GRANDCHILD—THEN FOUND OUT I PAID THE $9,800 RENT AND OWNS EVERYTHING INSIDE

Before we could mount a counter-offensive on our headquarters, we had to neutralize the leak closest to home.

By noon, Marcus’s private security team had located Julian.

He hadn't fled the country. He hadn't even left New York. He was holed up in a seedy, pay-by-the-week motel near the shipping docks in Red Hook, Brooklyn, paralyzed by terror.

When Marcus’s men kicked open the thin door to his motel room, Julian didn't fight. He was huddled on an unmade mattress in sweatpants, clutching an empty bottle of bourbon, his eyes bloodshot and swollen from crying.

"I didn't know!" he sobbed as Liam pushed him down into a plastic chair in the middle of the dingy room. "Sarah, Marcus, I swear on my mother’s grave, I didn't know they were going to bomb the lab!"

Marcus stood over him, radiating an aura of suppressed violence so absolute that Julian physically shrank back into the plastic slats.

"You gave them Eleanor’s security credentials," Marcus said, his voice deceptively low. "You signed offshore authorization slips as a former board trustee."

"They told me it was just an independent financial review!" Julian cried, tears streaming down his stubbled cheeks. "They said Sarah was going to be bought out for two billion dollars, and that if I helped verify the inventory, they’d give me five million to clear my restaurant debts! Then, two days ago, a man came to my apartment with a silenced pistol. He took my passport. He told me if I didn't stay in this room until the news broke, they’d drown Valerie and Leo in the Hudson!"

I stepped into Julian’s field of vision. For years, I had viewed Julian with lingering pity, then indifference. But looking at him now—a broken, pathetic remnant of a family that had once thought they could discard me like trash—I felt only clinical disgust.

"Where is the courier who took your passport?" I asked.

Julian swallowed hard, trembling. "He... he said he was meeting a contact at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at five o'clock. A boat. An offshore research vessel called the *Proteus*."

Clara gasped from the doorway. "The *Proteus*! That’s Helios’s floating laboratory! It’s registered under a Panamanian flag so they can bypass maritime jurisdiction and medical ethics laws!"