“I’m looking at the handshake logs for the Swiss relay,” Alexander said.

“I don’t follow, Mr. Sterling,” Marcus said.

“You routed the tracking packets through a private server in Zurich,” Alexander said. “But you forgot to scrub the secondary MAC address on the domestic router.”

The turn signal in the background suddenly stopped.

The silence that followed was different this time—it was cold and defensive.

“Alexander,” Marcus said, his voice losing its professional warmth.

“Seven years, Marcus,” Alexander said. “I trusted you with my life.”

“I was doing my job,” Marcus said.

“Your job was to protect me,” Alexander said. “Not to sell my family’s location to my mother.”

I stepped closer to the phone, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

“Marcus,” I said. “Why?”

The line crackled with static before Marcus spoke again.

“Emma,” Marcus said. “You shouldn’t have come back to New York.”

“She paid you,” I said. “Victoria paid you to keep us hidden.”

“She wanted to protect the Sterling legacy,” Marcus said. “Alexander was recovering. He was fragile.”

“I was in a coma, Marcus,” Alexander snarled. “I wasn’t dead.”