Chapter 10 - The Hidden Vault
The ballroom emptied rapidly as frightened guests were escorted outside by federal agents, leaving Julian standing alone amid the scattered flower petals, broken crystal, and dropped champagne flutes. The deafening silence that returned to the room felt heavy, suffocating, and entirely unreal. He felt as though he had lived through a lifetime in the span of a single hour. The nanny approached quietly from the side entrance, gently holding little Mia’s hand, keeping the child shielded from the wreckage of the ceremony.
"Mr. Vance," the lead federal agent said, walking back up to the altar with a heavy manila folder in her hand. "We've secured the primary servers, and the local assets have been frozen. However, our digital forensics team flagged an encrypted secondary drive linked to this address that we couldn't bypass."
Julian exhaled slowly, rubbing his temples where a splitting migraine had begun to throb. "What kind of drive?"
"We don't know," the agent replied, handing him a small, black hardware token stamped with the company logo. "Your brother’s private vault. According to our preliminary data logs, it requires a dual-key authorization—your biometric signature paired with a specific verbal passphrase known only to Sarah."
Julian stared at the small black device resting in his palm. Sarah. The missing piece of the puzzle. For six months, everyone had believed she fled out of guilt or fear, but now the truth was beginning to claw its way to the surface. She hadn't run away; she had been hunted.
"Where is she?" Julian asked, his voice cracking slightly as he looked up at the federal agent. "If Sarah is still alive, where are they keeping her?"
The agent hesitated, opening a tablet and tapping through a series of encrypted geolocation logs retrieved from Marcus's confiscated phone. "We tracked an outgoing ping from Marcus’s private terminal less than ten minutes before we breached the building. The signal originated from an abandoned coastal property three miles outside the city limits."
May you like
Julian gripped the hardware token tightly, his knuckles turning white. Without a second thought, he turned and sprinted toward the exit.
---
