My father pressed his thumb into my unbroken shoulder while blood ran behind my ear.

The recovery room was quiet when I woke up. The sharp, searing agony in my forearm had softened into a heavy, throbbing numbness, courtesy of a nerve block and intravenous painkillers. A crisp white cast stretched from my knuckles to just below my elbow.

Standing at the foot of my bed wasn't a doctor or a police officer.

It was Marcus Vance—no relation to Victoria’s fiancé Julian, though the shared surname was a poetic irony I always appreciated. Marcus was my chief operating officer at Hawthorne Forensics, my true firm. Dressed in a sharp dark suit, holding an encrypted satchel, he looked every bit the high-stakes investigator he was.

“You look terrible, Chief,” Marcus said quietly, though his eyes burned with suppressed anger.

“I’ve looked worse,” I rasped, my throat dry. “Did you get the drive?”

Marcus held up a small, black USB device. “Secured from your decoy townhouse forty minutes ago. Your emergency protocols executed automatically the second your heart rate spiked on your smartwatch during the assault. We have complete audio of the incident, Claire.”

I closed my eyes briefly. When Victoria had raised the bronze statue, my smartwatch—programmed with Hawthorne’s custom biometric safety software—had detected the rapid deceleration of a strike and the sudden spike in my vitals. It had immediately initiated a covert audio recording and uploaded it to Hawthorne’s secure cloud servers.

“What about my family?” I asked.

“Your father tried to pull strings with the hospital administration to have you quietly transferred to a private clinic in Connecticut,” Marcus said, pulling a chair over. “Dr. Reed personally blocked the transfer, citing medical instability. Meanwhile, Detective Morales impounded the Bentley. She recovered the printed ledger from your coat.”

“And Victoria?”

“She’s currently at the Whitmore estate with her fiancé, preparing for their pre-wedding press conference tomorrow afternoon. They’re planning to announce the merger of Whitmore Capital and Vance Global Equity. They have no idea Morales has the ledger.”

“They think I’m broken,” I murmured. “They think I’ll lie to protect the family name, just like I’ve done for thirty-three years.”

“So, what’s the play?” Marcus leaned forward. “Do we release the audio to the district attorney? We can have Victoria arrested by noon.”

“No,” I said firmly, opening my eyes. “An arrest is too clean. My father would hire a team of defense attorneys, post bail, and bury the story in public relations spin. He would spin Victoria as a stressed bride and me as a bitter, unstable daughter trying to ruin her sister’s life. They’ve spent decades crafting that narrative about me.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I want to tear down the entire illusion,” I said, my voice cold and focused. “Hawthorne Forensics spent five years building deep audit files on Vance Global Equity and my father’s off-book accounts. I kept them locked away because I held onto a pathetic hope that one day my family would see me as something other than a burden.”

I looked down at the heavy white cast on my arm.

“That hope died on my father’s office floor. Marcus, activate Protocol Zero. I want every asset Hawthorne owns deployed against Whitmore Capital and Vance Global Equity. We aren't just reporting a crime. We are going to execute a complete corporate acquisition.”