The line went dead as Marcus cut the feed.

“Clara?” Marcus’s voice returned. “Did you get all of that?”

“Every word,” I said, my fingers already flying across the tablet keyboard.

“She’s going to liquidate everything,” Marcus said. “If she gets that money out of the country, we’ll never recover it.”

I looked out the window at the blurred lights of the Chicago skyline, the rain slashing across the glass like tiny knives.

Vivian Bradford thought she could slip away into the night with what remained of her empire.

She thought her wealth was protected by old-world bank codes and offshore walls.

But she didn’t understand the digital world I had conquered.

I opened the secure terminal, typing in the administrative bypass codes we had quietly harvested from the Bradford servers over the past month.

“Marcus,” I said, my voice steady as the SUV accelerated down the highway. “Tell our team to stand by.”

“What’s the plan?” he asked.

“We don’t stop her from initiating the transfer,” I said, watching the digital clock on my dashboard tick closer to midnight. “We let her think she’s winning.”