Inheritance ✔

Chapter 14 - Breaking Point

Laurier Ashford's POV

The buzz of my emergency line shattered the silence before sunrise.

I was half-asleep, tangled in the sheets beside Renzo. The vibration on the nightstand wasn't loud—but it was distinct. Sharp. Measured. Three short pulses.

My heart jolted into motion.

Renzo stirred behind me just as I grabbed the phone and swiped across the screen.

CODE 6: Internal Breach – East Tower, Floor 24.

I sat up straight, heartbeat thudding in my ears.

Renzo was already upright. "What is it?"

"Breach," I said. "Internal."

He didn't wait for the rest. We both shot out of bed, no wasted movement.

I grabbed a long-sleeve shirt and black boots. Renzo pulled on a black tactical jacket and his sidearm. The look he gave me was brief, focused, and without panic.

We knew the drill.

What we didn't know—what scared me more than another bomb threat or an outside attack—was the word "internal."

This wasn't Dagon trying to crash in through the front door.

This was someone already inside.

The elevator ride down was painfully quiet. The kind of silence where everything was just barely holding together.

Renzo stood next to me, calm but alert, fingers twitching against his thigh. I hadn't seen that tell in months. It only showed up when he was seconds away from switching modes—from protector to predator.

As soon as the elevator opened on the 24th floor, the scent hit me.

Burnt metal.

Electrical wire.

I strode forward, heels echoing in the dim corridor. The lighting was reduced to backup mode—weak overheads casting long shadows across the floor. A pair of security doors had been brutally forced open, not hacked or triggered. Physically torn apart.

"What the hell..." I whispered.

Renzo was already crouched by the broken panels, fingers brushing over the edges of the torn metal.

"This wasn't finesse," he said. "This was brute force."

We stepped into the data room together.

And everything stopped.

The room was a mess of destruction—open server racks, shattered drives, severed cables.

But what made my stomach turn wasn't the loss of equipment.

It was the backup unit.

Melted.

Completely torched.

Someone had known exactly what they were looking for—and what they couldn't leave behind.

Renzo's jaw clenched. "They wiped years of archives."

"Security footage. Contract logs. Encrypted files from Dad's tenure."

I turned slowly, surveying the carnage. One of the far corners caught my eye—a blinking red light.

"Renzo," I said quietly, stepping forward.

There, barely noticeable, was a tiny camera, separate from the rest of our internal system. A hidden recording device. Not wired into our grid. Independent.