Chapter 13 - The Sniper's Dot
The tiny, bright red dot danced across the wet fabric of Sylvia’s white tank top, resting directly over her heart. Time seemed to freeze in the courtyard. The wailing sirens, the shouting reporters, and the falling rain faded into a dull background hum as every eye in the courtyard snapped toward the high scaffolding of the unfinished construction site across the street.
"Get down!" Judge Harrison roared, lunging forward and shoving Sylvia down against the floorboards of the unmarked sedan as a deafening crack split the morning air.
Bang.
A high-powered rifle bullet shattered the rear window of the sedan, showering the interior with safety glass that sparkled like diamonds in the amber streetlights. Julian screamed, ducking beneath the passenger seat, while Elena threw her weight against the car door, slamming it shut and locking the heavy security plates into place.
"Driver, go! Now!" Elena shouted, her voice sharp and commanding.
The unmarked sedan lurched forward, tires spinning against the wet asphalt before shooting down the avenue at high speed, leaving the flashing lights of the police cruisers behind. In the back seat, Sylvia slowly pushed herself up from the floorboards, brushing glass fragments from her reddish-brown hair and scraping a tiny sliver of glass from her palm. She didn't cry. She didn't scream. She simply reached up and touched the gold "SV" pendant, feeling the cool metal intact against her skin.
"That wasn't Victoria," Sylvia said quietly, her voice unnervingly calm as she looked out the shattered rear window at the receding skyscraper. "Victoria is locked in a holding cell. That was the board’s contingency buyer."
Julian trembled beside her, clutching his knees to his chest. "A contingency buyer? Who would order a hit in the middle of a federal police blockade?"
"Whoever bought the remaining debt on the hotel group," Elena replied from the front passenger seat, her eyes fixed on the encrypted tablet screen in her lap. She was scrolling through a rapidly updating list of high-frequency stock transactions executed just seconds before the sniper shot was fired. "Look at this. Someone just shorted Sterling Corp stock by ninety-eight percent, then immediately bought up the remaining controlling shares for pennies on the dollar through an anonymous shell corporation based in the Cayman Islands."
Sylvia leaned forward, squinting at the screen. The shell corporation's registration code matched a signature she recognized from her father’s old business logs—a signature belonging to Christopher Sterling, her long-lost uncle who had supposedly died in a plane crash thirty years ago.
"Christopher isn't dead," Sylvia whispered, the realization hitting her like a physical blow. "He didn't die in the crash. He helped Victoria frame my father, and now he’s coming for the rest of the empire."
Judge Harrison, who had remained remarkably composed despite the gunfire, turned around from the front seat, holding a secure encrypted phone. "If Christopher is alive, then the entire corporate structure we just seized is built on a stolen foundation. He legally holds the primary founder’s shares."
Sylvia sat back against the leather seat, her bruised face reflecting the amber glow of the dashboard lights. She reached into her pocket, pulled out Arthur Sterling’s leather-bound journal, and flipped to the very last page—the page containing the Swiss clearinghouse routing code.
"He can have the corporation," Sylvia said, a cold, fierce light returning to her eyes. "Because the hotel was never the real empire."
She pressed her thumb against the journal's spine, and a hidden compartment in the back cover slid open, revealing a physical paper key stamped with the family crest.
"What is that?" Julian asked, staring at the key in disbelief.
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"The key to the primary bullion vault beneath Lake Geneva," Sylvia said, looking out the window as the car sped toward the private airfield. "And Christopher just walked right into our trap."
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