The Blood Clock's Toll: A Boston Watchmaker's Deadly Survival War Against His Own Brother
👉 Previous Decision: You chose Option B – To allow Maya to execute her decoy swap plan while Julian draws Silas’s direct fire.
The driving rain provided the perfect cover. Maya and I moved like shadows, using Harlan’s old schematics to access a hidden maintenance tunnel beneath the Custom House Clock Tower.
The air inside was thick with the scent of old iron and damp concrete. Maya’s portable server lit up the dark, industrial space.
“Silas’s regional server,” she whispered, her fingers flying across the holographic keyboard. “He’s running a massive data-farm in here.”
She worked quickly, bypassing layers of encryption. Within minutes, a message flashed: “Master Key Acquired.” She downloaded it onto a flash drive, her eyes gleaming.
Meanwhile, I examined the blood clock again under the beam of my tactical flashlight. My thumb brushed against the mainspring arbor, the tiny central pin that anchored the watch’s power source.
There, almost invisible, I saw it. Micro-engraved characters. A long, complex string of letters and numbers.
Twist 11. The missing $8,500,000 in bearer bonds never existed in paper form. They were a phantom, a lure.
This wasn’t a physical fortune. It was an offshore cold-storage digital wallet key, engraved directly onto the watch’s internal arbor pin. Silas had tricked me into believing in a tangible treasure, when the true prize was a string of characters only accessible with the clock.
“He made it digital,” I murmured, the revelation chilling me to the bone. “Encrypted inside the watch itself.”
Maya looked up, her expression grim. “He wanted to control it, Dad. To be the only one who could access it.”
But now, we had the master key, and the true nature of his fortune. The balance of power was shifting.
➡️ Read CHAPTER 13 to continue the story.
More Stories
+ There are no comments
Add yours