Inheritance ✔

Chapter 14 - Breaking Point

His brow furrowed as he leaned in.

"Someone was watching this room off the books."

"And they forgot to take their toy."

Or maybe they didn't forget. Maybe they wanted to be seen now.

Either way, we were going to find out.

Back upstairs, Renzo prepped the SD card we'd extracted from the camera. The lights in the security control room buzzed softly above us. My pulse still hadn't settled.

He hooked the drive into a secure, offline laptop. No networks. No external ports. No connection to the mainframe.

Just us, the screen, and the unknown.

We watched in silence.

The timestamp read 2:14 a.m.

Dark hallway. Empty.

Then, a figure slipped into frame. Swift, careful, hood pulled up. Light frame. Moving like they knew exactly where the cameras were—and exactly how much they could afford to show.

I leaned in. Renzo slowed the footage. Frame by frame.

When they turned slightly toward the wall, the light caught their cheek.

And I froze.

I'd seen that face a hundred times.

"Pause."

Renzo did.

The frame stilled.

Not masked. Not pixelated. Not guessed.

Clara Leigh Navarro.

I stood there, unable to speak for a second.

Clara—my assistant legal counsel. My quiet shadow in meetings. The one who once brought me hot tea during a boardroom ambush. The one who stayed late just to review contracts I'd already memorized.

Her.

Inside the destroyed data floor.

Her.

Wiping years of files and feeding Dagon from the inside.

I felt Renzo's eyes on me.

"You're sure?"

"I'm not guessing."

"She had access."

"She had everything."

He looked back at the screen. His hand was resting on the edge of the table, curled slightly into a fist.

"Do you want her brought in alive?"

"Not yet."

I walked away before I changed my mind.

We spent the next few hours combing through Clara's last known locations.

She hadn't clocked in that morning. Her condo? Empty. Her phone? Disconnected. Her car hadn't moved from its garage in days. She'd ghosted everyone—family, coworkers, even her emergency contact.

But she hadn't covered her tracks completely.

She'd left behind a log-in from three days ago. A single session on a personal laptop routed through a secondary Wi-Fi network—one our IT team identified within an hour.

We traced the signal.

Not to Dagon.

To an off-grid storage house in Taytay.

Renzo pulled his holster from the weapons drawer.

"I'm going."

"I'm going too."

He gave me a look.

"You can't—"

"Don't," I snapped. "Don't tell me to stay safe. I let her in, Renzo. I let her get that close. I'm not hiding while you clean it up."

His mouth was a thin line. "Then you follow my lead."

"Always."

The safehouse was empty when we arrived—at least of people.

But what Clara had left behind was worse than I imagined.

Stacks of stolen drives.

Multiple flash units.

A single folder labeled in handwriting I recognized: Ashford Projects – Confidential.

Inside were hard copies of several of our underground agreements—black operations, off-book acquisitions, and one file I'd buried so deep even Renzo hadn't seen it.

The Midas Briefing.

It was a thirty-page contract involving foreign donors, bribed officials, and an Ashford subsidiary laundering real estate for foreign clients under my father's original network.

If that ever went public—

I couldn't finish the thought.

Renzo said nothing as he watched me read.

Then, "She took a copy."

"She wanted to burn me. Not just the company. Me."

"And she will."

I looked at him.

"But not before we burn her first," he added.

And for the first time in years, I felt something deeper than fear.

Betrayal.

And beneath it, rage.

That night, the rain returned.

I stood on the balcony outside my penthouse, the wind lashing against my arms, soaking through my blouse.

Renzo found me there, again.

He didn't say anything at first.

Then, quietly, "You're going to catch a cold."

I didn't turn. "So let me."

He stepped beside me, our arms almost brushing.

"You gave her your trust," he said softly. "You gave her a chance to be part of something bigger."

"And she fed it to the man who almost ruined my life."

"She's not walking away from this."

I finally looked at him.

"I don't care if we find her dead or alive," I said. "But we will find her."

Rain dripped down his jaw.

Then he did something rare—he reached for my hand and held it.

No armor. No gloves. Just skin.

And I didn't pull away.