CHAPTER 4
Mara stumbled backward, her hand pressing against the doorframe as fresh tears spilled over her cheeks, running down the very face that once held so much innocence.
"You lied to me," Mara whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of an overwhelming betrayal she had never seen coming. "You used me to get Mom out of the way!"
"Oh, stop being so dramatic, little girl," Celeste snapped, putting down her wine glass and stepping forward with a disgusted glare. "You got a brand-new Mercedes, a luxury apartment downtown, and an unlimited credit card out of the deal. Stop whining like a spoiled brat and do what your father told you."
Mara turned her tear-streaked face toward me, her eyes locking onto my burned, scarred cheek with a sudden, devastating wave of guilt.
She saw the quiet, unyielding calm in my eyes—not the broken, insane woman Victor had spent three weeks painting her mother to be, but the fierce corporate titan who had built an empire from nothing.
"Mom..." Mara sobbed, taking a hesitant step toward me on the rug, her hands shaking uncontrollably. "Mom, I'm... I'm so sorry..."
"Don't bother, Mara," I rasped out, my voice rough and gravelly from the smoke damage to my vocal cords, but carrying an unmistakable authority that commanded the entire room. "You made your choice the moment you put your boot on my wounds."
Before Victor could react to the change in the atmosphere, the high-pitched chime of his secure satellite phone echoed through the quiet living room.
He pulled the encrypted device from his jacket pocket, pressing it to his ear with an arrogant smirk that quickly withered into pure, unadulterated horror.
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"Victor!" his chief technology officer screamed over the speaker so loudly that even Celeste heard every word. "Our servers on the Vengeance are being systematically purged! Someone is executing an external biometric override and transmitting our entire dark ledger!"
Victor’s face turned as white as a sheet, his eyes wildly scanning the room until they settled on the small black device resting inside my scarred palm.
