Strip off that coat and go clear dirty plates in the banquet hall, Nia—you're staff tonight, not family, my mother-in-law Evelyn snapped, her voice echoing across the candlelit grand ballroom.
The ballroom erupted into a controlled flurry of activity. Cassius’s men were moving with swift precision, securing Evelyn’s papers, confirming asset freezes, and beginning the initial audit of the Vault’s central ledger. Evelyn herself was being escorted towards a side exit, her protests weak and hoarse, her once formidable presence reduced to a pathetic whimper.
In the chaos, my eyes darted to where Marcus had been standing. The enforcers were no longer holding him. He was gone.
A prickle of alarm ran down my spine. Marcus was a rat, but he wasn’t stupid. He had been watching, always watching.
I scanned the room, pushing through clusters of murmuring financiers. Behind the ornate stage, I spotted a narrow, almost invisible service door, half-hidden by a heavy velvet curtain. It was slightly ajar.
My heart hammered. He wouldn’t just vanish empty-handed.
“Tariq!” I called out, spotting the venue’s operations director overseeing the securing of the main vault doors.
He rushed over, his usual professional composure now tinged with urgency. “Madam Hollis?”
“Marcus,” I said, pointing towards the service door. “He slipped out. He had a metallic briefcase earlier. A heavy one.”
Tariq’s eyes widened, a dawning horror on his face. “The secondary vault… his mother’s private safe… it has untraceable shadow tokens.”
He didn’t wait for me to explain further. He sprinted toward the service door, barking orders into his headset. But it was too late.
By the time Tariq’s men reached the alley behind the stage, Marcus was long gone. The heavy metallic briefcase, containing $4,000,000 in un-encrypted shadow tokens from his mother’s private safe, vanished with him into the maze of Atlanta’s back alleys.
He hadn’t been trying to save Evelyn. He’d been trying to save himself, pilfering his mother’s hidden cache in the final moments of her reign. He was a thief, now a fugitive, slipping away into the night with a significant chunk of syndicate capital.
My victory felt sudden and bittersweet. I had reclaimed my family’s legacy, but Marcus, the man I once loved, had become a ghost, leaving a new, unwelcome complication in his wake.
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