During our $10 million mansion housewarming party, I went up to the master suite to rest my heavy pregnant belly. When I opened the door, I found my fiancé and my young stepmother tangled in my custom silk sheets. I gasped, but he didn’t panic. He calmly got up, locked the heavy oak door, and smirked.

My breath caught in my throat. The Bel-Air estate wasn't just a house; it contained my father’s primary offline servers—the only place where the master source code for Vanguard’s military-grade defense AI was stored. If that server room was destroyed or compromised, our core technological advantage would be lost forever.

“Who breached the perimeter?” I demanded, handing Eleanor back to the nurse and grabbing my coat.

“Security cameras caught a single vehicle entering through the rear delivery gate,” Marcus reported grimly, pulling up the live security feed on his tablet. “It was Damian. He used your father’s old master security pass—the one that was supposed to have been revoked two years ago.”

Damian didn't care about the stock market. He knew Julian Sterling was going to be the sacrificial lamb. While the entire world was watching the financial bloodbath on Wall Street, Damian had gone to the one place where he could steal the ultimate prize: the AI source code, worth billions on the international black market.

“Get the tactical team,” I snapped, moving toward the private executive elevator. “We’re going home.”

Twenty minutes later, my three-car armored motorcade roared through the gates of the Bel-Air compound.

The estate was eerily quiet. The manicured lawns were shadowed under the gray afternoon sky, and the heavy front doors of the mansion stood wide open, swinging gently in the wind. The local security guards hired to watch the perimeter were lying unconscious on the marble driveway, paralyzed by high-grade stun darts.

“Clear the foyer!” Marcus barked, drawing his tactical firearm as his men fanned out in a tight perimeter around me.

I ignored his warnings to stay in the bulletproof vehicle and stepped into the house. The air inside smelled of ozone, burnt copper, and spent gunpowder. The grand chandelier in the main hallway was shattered, glittering glass covering the floor like fallen snow.

We moved silently down the long, mahogany-paneled corridor toward my father’s private study. The heavy steel vault door leading down to the subterranean server room was wide open, its electronic lock melted away by a thermite torch.

“Stay back, Victoria,” Marcus warned, raising his gun as we reached the threshold of the study.

“No,” I said, pushing past him.

Sitting behind my father’s massive oak desk was Damian Thorne.

He didn't look like the polished, suave corporate executive I had met two years ago. His expensive designer suit was torn and stained with grease, his hair wild, his eyes bloodshot and unhinged. On the desk in front of him sat a military-grade hard drive, glowing red as it downloaded the final files from the Vanguard master mainframe.

Beside the hard drive sat a small, black plastic detonator with a digital countdown timer pulsing in red numbers: 02:15... 02:14... 02:13...

“Hello, darling,” Damian sneered, looking up at me with a terrifying, hysterical grin. He held his thumb hovering directly over a red button on the side of the detonator. “I figured you’d come. You always were so delightfully predictable.”

“Put the detonator down, Damian,” Marcus ordered, aiming his laser sight directly at Damian’s forehead. “There are six sniper red-dots on your chest right now. You pull that trigger, and you die before your finger moves a millimeter.”

Damian laughed, a harsh, crazy sound that sent shivers down my spine. “Shoot me! Go ahead, Marine! This detonator is rigged to a dead-man's switch! My heart stops, or my thumb slips off this button, and the thermite charges planted in the server room detonate instantly. The whole mansion goes up in a mountain of fire.”

Marcus froze, his jaw tightening, but he didn't lower his weapon.

I stepped forward, putting myself directly between Damian and Marcus’s gun. “What do you want, Damian? You lost. Julian Sterling is in FBI custody. Your accounts are frozen. You have nowhere left to run.”

“I don't need Julian anymore!” Damian spat, his voice cracking with unhinged madness. “Julian was an old fool! The people I’m working for now—the syndicate in Shanghai—they don't care about Wall Street stocks. They paid me fifty million dollars in cryptocurrency just to extract this AI code! With this drive, I can buy a new identity, a new face, a new life on a private island while you rot in the ashes of your father's house!”

The digital timer on the desk ticked down ruthlessly: 01:02... 01:01... 01:00...

“You really think you can just walk out of here?” I asked, taking another slow, deliberate step toward the desk.

“I know I can!” Damian shouted, his thumb pressing down harder on the dead-man's switch. “Because if I die, your father’s life work dies with me! The code vanishes forever! Back up, Victoria! Back up or I blow us all to hell!”

I stopped three feet from the desk. I looked at the glowing red hard drive. Then I looked into the eyes of the man who had lied to me, cheated on me, poisoned my father, and tried to steal my children.

I didn't panic. I didn't cry.

I reached up to my lapel, unpinning a small, elegant platinum brooch shaped like an orchid—the exact same design as the diamond necklace he had given me.

“Did you really think I only put one camera on you, Damian?” I murmured softly.

Damian’s eyes widened in sudden, horrifying realization.

“You forgot rule number one of Vanguard AI defense systems,” I whispered, leaning over the desk until I was inches from his face. “The code on that server isn't encrypted by a password. It’s encrypted by my voice and my biometric pulse.”

I raised my voice, speaking clearly into the room: “System override code: Omega-7-Vanguard. Authorize wipe.”

From deep beneath our feet, a low, mechanical hum vibrated through the floorboards, followed by the high-pitched whine of fried circuits. On the desk, the glowing red hard drive suddenly flickered, turned blue, and displayed a single message across its screen: DATA PERMANENTLY ERASED.

Damian’s mouth dropped open in absolute, speechless horror as he watched the fifty-million-dollar files vanish into worthless corrupt data.

“No… NO! WHAT DID YOU DO?!” he shrieked, raising his hand off the dead-man's switch in a fit of hysterical, blind panic.

He forgot the dead-man's switch.

CRACK!

A single high-caliber bullet shattered the window behind him, striking Damian precisely in the shoulder. The force of the shot blew him backward over the oak desk, slamming him hard against the floor as the detonator flew out of his hand, skidding harmlessly across the marble tile.

Marcus lunged forward, kicking the detonator away and pinning Damian’s face to the floor with his combat boot, slapping heavy steel restraints onto his wrists.

Damian screamed in agony, clutching his bloody shoulder, sobbing like a child. “My money… my code… you destroyed everything!”