Chapter 95 - Bloodline of Puppeteers
The intermediate deck was a subterranean labyrinth of server farms and pneumatic control systems. Millions of dollars in enterprise-grade fiber cables snaked across the ceilings in thick black bundles, humming with enough electrical current to illuminate a mid-sized city.
As we breached the inner security bulkhead, I stumbled upon a high-security archive room. Walls of illuminated glass cases displayed hard-copy ledgers, passport stashes, and black leather portfolios stamped with the crest of my family's historic estate.
I paused before the central desk. Resting upon a green-felt blotter was my father’s gold signet ring—the one he had claimed to have lost on the day my brother supposedly died. Beside it lay the original vehicle registration of the truck that had struck my husband’s car on that icy mountain turn two years ago.
It wasn't an accident. It hadn't even been an opportunistic hit ordered by Evelyn out of sheer vanity.
The hit had been commissioned from this very desk, eight months before the collision occurred. A typed directive, signed with Julian's distinctive, sloping penmanship, detailed the exact payout to the foreign driver, down to the offshore escrow account funded by my own inheritance trust.
Julian had not merely abandoned his family; he had systematically liquidated my husband and children because their existence threatened the total consolidation of the family's assets under his foreign ghost entity. To Julian, my husband David’s independent forensic accounting firm had come too close to discovering the multi-billion-dollar transnational laundering corridor disguised as our father’s manufacturing business.
"He murdered them on paper first," I whispered, my fingers trembling as I held the yellowing carbon copy of the execution order. "He calculated the return on their lives down to the third decimal."
"He didn't just target you, Claire," Ethan murmured, pointing his tactical light toward the back wall.
A massive visual flow chart covered the steel partition. At the top was our mother and father, marked with red liquidation dates slated for the end of the current fiscal year. Below them was Evelyn, her portrait crossed out with a heavy black marker and stamped: *EXPENDABLE ASSET — TERMINATED.*
Julian hadn’t just betrayed me; he was wiping the entire bloodline clean, leaving himself as the sole surviving heir to an untraceable empire of stolen sovereign wealth. The mother who had wept for him, the father who had bankrupted his honor to bury him, and the spoiled sister who had worshiped him were nothing more than cattle scheduled for the slaughterhouse.
"He is a psychopath," Ethan said flatly. "There is no family here. There never was."
"No," I replied, tearing the document from the desk and thrusting it into my tactical vest. "There is only a pestilence that needs to be burned out."
A metallic chime echoed through the ceiling speakers, followed by the sound of slow, mocking applause.
*"Very observant, Claire,"* Julian's voice drifted through the intercom, resonant and smooth. *"I always said you had the sharpest eye of the three of us. A pity you wasted it on a provincial husband and two noisy brats who never understood the magnitude of the world we were meant to rule."*
May you like
The heavy bulkhead doors behind us slammed shut with the hydraulic screech of an iron vault.
***
