"I need to go confirm this, Bella. I need to..." His jaw works furiously, that feverish light dancing in his eyes. "I'll be back as soon as I know anything solid. Don't go anywhere, yeah?"
The words are barely out before he's on his feet, long legs devouring the space between the couch and the door in a few determined strides.
Something in Ethan's gaze, that blazing intensity, that raw hope, ignites a fierce spark within me that I thought had died with Ares's departure.
"Ethan, wait!"
My voice rings out, raw but unwavering, as I scramble off the couch. He pauses, hand on the door, eyes questioning as I cross the space between us in a few long strides.
"You're not going without me." I state it as fact, no room for argument. "I'm coming with you."
For the first time since Ares left, I feel something other than crushing grief. Something that feels dangerously like hope.
31
Bella
"Holy shit," Ethan breathes, his eyes scanning the page for the third time. "This is it, Bella. This is the fucking key."
The loft's exposed bulbs cast harsh shadows across the scattered papers covering my dining table. After the frantic drive to retrieve Ethan's laptop from his hotel room and back to my place, we've barely moved from this spot. My back aches from leaning forward, but the adrenaline coursing through my veins won't let me rest.
Project Cerberus. The name keeps jumping out from the pages, alongside account numbers, offshore holdings, and cryptic references to something called "Omega." I don't understand half of what I'm reading, but Ethan's feverish intensity tells me everything I need to know.
"Look at this," he says, tapping a finger against a sequence of numbers. "These are routing codes for Cayman accounts. And these—" his finger slides to another set of figures, "—these match the pattern we've been trying to crack for weeks."
I squint at the yellowed paper, trying to make sense of the strings of numbers and letters. "How do you know this is what we need?"
Ethan's fingers fly across the keyboard, inputting sequences from the paper into his decryption program. The screen flickers, lines of code running faster than I can process.
"Remember how I told you we needed more than just the numbers? We needed context, something to anchor the pattern?" His voice vibrates with barely contained excitement. "Every 'Protocol Echo' entry has a corresponding 'Cerberus' phase—that's what Ares and I discovered. But we couldn't make sense of the Omega channels because we were missing the cipher."
He holds up the paper, his smile sharp enough to cut glass. "This isn't just any list of numbers, Bella. This is Theodore's personal encryption key—the master code that unlocks everything. The one thing he never digitizes because it's too dangerous to have in the system."
The screen suddenly changes, encrypted files transforming into readable documents before our eyes.
"Holy..." I breathe as spreadsheets, bank statements, and transaction records fill the screen.
"Exactly." Ethan's eyes meet mine, fierce with determination. "Your grandmother didn't just find a random piece of paper. She found the master key to Theodore's entire shadow operation. No wonder he was willing to destroy lives to get it back."
My heart hammers against my ribs as I watch years of Theodore's carefully hidden corruption unfold on the screen.
"What exactly are we looking at here?" I ask, gesturing to the laptop.
Ethan runs a hand through his already disheveled hair. "From what I can piece together? Money laundering, embezzlement, corporate espionage—the works. He's been siphoning funds from Saint Industries' charitable foundations into personal accounts for years."
As I let that sink in, my mind starts to piece things together.
"Wells tried to access these files when my grandmother caught him in Theodore's office," I whisper, the pieces finally clicking into place.
My mind races through the entries in her diary, seeing them in a new light. "But when he left in a hurry, he left this piece of paper. And when he found out what he lost, he got scared. Because if my grandmother would tell Theodore about finding Wells in his office behind his computer, he'd be in serious trouble. So my grandmother became a liability."
Ethan's expression darkens. "And Olivia gave Wells the perfect opportunity when she asked him to help her with the jewelry theft setup."
"But why kill Wells later?" I ask.
"My guess?" Ethan's mouth twists in disgust. "Wells got greedy. He probably threatened to expose everything he knew if Theodore didn't pay up. That would explain the two million payment a month after the 'theft'—not a bonus for a job well done, but hush money." He shakes his head. "What Wells didn't realize is that people like Theodore Saint don't stay under anyone's thumb for long. It's easier to make the person causing the problem disappear than to keep paying them off."
A cold fury settles in my chest, crystallizing into something hard and unbreakable. All these years, all that pain and loss—because my grandmother was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
