Her voice bounced off the high ceilings of the empty rooms.

“Do not make this more difficult than it already is,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

I reached out with my left hand and touched the small brass intercom panel mounted on the wall beside the parlor door.

It was an old system my father had installed forty years ago, but the wiring ran directly into the basement server.

I pressed the button, keeping my hand flat over the speaker to muffle the click.

“System status,” I whispered into the small brass grille.

A faint, high-pitched whine hummed through the wall.

The small LED indicator on the panel flickered from red to a steady, pale blue.

In the parlor, the footsteps stopped.

“What was that?” one of the guards asked.

“A power surge,” Voss said. “The house is on an old generator.”

“No,” Caroline said, her voice dropping a fraction of an octave. “That was the internal network.”

I knew she was right.

My father had designed the security grid to respond to vocal biometrics, but he had programmed a backdoor during my training.