Book one: Chapter Five
1114 Words
Eva stared at the screen like it might burst into flames.
The folder waited, blinking—Warehouse Footage: 2014.
Her hand hovered over the trackpad. A whisper in her mind told her to shut it all down, to take Emmy and run, to disappear like Margot.
But the past never stayed buried.
She clicked.
The video began, timestamped October 14, 2014, 2:07 a.m.
The screen flickered to life. Night vision. A warehouse, half-demolished, full of shadows and crates. Somewhere in Brooklyn.
She saw them.
Herself, younger—sleeves rolled, jaw tight. Jude—precision in motion, wiring something to the crates. Margot—nervous, pacing, whispering into a burner phone. Wren—head down, tapping furiously on a laptop. And Alina, the center of the storm, calm and surgical.
Eva hadn’t seen this footage before.
She thought it had been destroyed.
They all had.
---
2014
It had started as a whistleblowing op. That’s what Alina called it. A way to dismantle a human trafficking pipeline laundering money through a fake cryptocurrency fund. The target: a man named Cassian Redd.
He was untouchable.
Government ties. Offshore accounts. Lawyers on retainer.
Until Wren found the ledgers.
They were raw data back then, clumsy and incomplete, but enough to prove Redd was using underage girls to smuggle crypto wallets across international borders—wallets encoded to autowipe if scanned incorrectly.
Children as mules.
That’s what pushed Eva over the edge.
That’s what made them go dark.
Margot leased the warehouse under a dummy corp. Wren set up a honeypot system to draw in the final transfer. Jude built the exit protocols. Eva forged the hospital scans.
And Alina made the call.
“We expose him,” she said, “or we bury him.”
They chose the latter.
---
The footage shifted—static—then settled again.
Eva watched in horror as her younger self loaded black fire accelerant into a decoy fuel tank.
Watched Margot hand over the final key drive.
Watched Jude set the charges.
Watched Wren encrypt the last ledger copy into a digital dead-drop known only to five access points.
And then—
Redd arrived.
He wasn’t supposed to be there.
That night was only about data. Intimidation. A final burn.
But he walked in with two men. Guns drawn.
The girls scattered like sparks.
Margot screamed.
A shot rang out.
Alina dropped to the floor, grabbed the detonator, and hit the trigger.
The screen went white.
When it cleared, the building was smoke and ash.
And Redd was dead.
---
Eva slammed the laptop shut, heart slamming against her ribs.
Who had this footage?
Only five of them had access to those surveillance feeds.
And if someone was weaponizing it—using it now, after all these years—then the dead were truly restless.
She picked up her phone and called Alina.
It rang once. Twice.
Then—
“Eva?”
“They have the video.”
A long pause.
“Who?” Alina asked.
“I don’t know. It was on my laptop when I got home.”
“No trace?”
“Clean. Professional. It had to be Jude.”
Alina’s voice was colder now. “What did it show?”
“Everything. The fire. Redd. Us.”
Alina cursed softly. “Where’s Emmy?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Keep her close. I’m sending Dorian.”
“No,” Eva said quickly. “No suits, no black cars. I can’t draw attention. My daughter lives here.”
Alina hesitated. Then: “Tomorrow. Meet me at the Astoria Conservancy at ten. It’s public. You’ll be safe.”
Eva nodded, even though Alina couldn’t see it. “Okay.”
She hung up and leaned against the counter.
The past had found her.
And it had teeth.
---
Meanwhile, in Zürich, Jude watched the same footage projected against a concrete wall, glass of scotch in hand.
Virelli sat nearby, silent and pleased.
“You always struck me as the cold one,” he said. “But watching that? I think maybe you felt it more than you let on.”
Jude’s expression didn’t change. “Emotion is expensive.”
“And yet,” Virelli mused, “you haven’t leaked the full version yet.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“When it hurts most.”
He chuckled. “You know what I admire, Ms. Lancaster?”
“Nothing about me,” she said flatly.
He ignored her. “You don’t just want to break her empire. You want to make her feel every crack.”
Jude finished her drink. “Alina Vale built her fortune on blood and ash. No one gets to pretend they were clean.”
“You still haven’t told me why.”
Jude looked at him then. Her eyes dark.
“Because she made the call. And I buried the body.”
---
Wren watched from the shadows.
She’d tracked Jude to Zürich days ago, cracked into three of her burner accounts, and now stood across the street from the Virelli building with a long lens and a line to Dorian.
“She’s leaning into vengeance,” she whispered into her earpiece.
Dorian’s voice crackled through. “I don’t trust her angle.”
“She’s using the footage as currency. But she hasn’t hit send yet.”
“Which means she’s still deciding how this ends.”
Wren exhaled. “I can ghost her.”
“No. Let her burn out. We need her angry. Not afraid.”
She clicked off the line and narrowed her gaze on the window four stories up.
Jude wasn’t just trying to fracture the group.
She was trying to rewrite history.
And only one of them had the full truth.
---
Back in Manhattan, Alina opened a sealed drawer in her study.
Inside was a small black envelope. Handwritten on it, in Margot’s looping script: “Only if everything falls apart.”
She’d never opened it.
Not in ten years.
She slit the seal and unfolded the paper.
There was only a single sentence.
> “We were never the Fifth Key. We were the vault.”
Alina’s heart stalled.
What did that mean?
A second slip of paper was folded beneath it—a set of coordinates.
Brooklyn.
Alina ran the numbers through her secure terminal.
It pointed to a small, defunct building owned by a shell company long since forgotten.
Not the vault on Fifth Avenue.
Another one.
One none of them had ever spoken about.
Which meant Margot had her own game.
Alina picked up the phone.
“Wren.”
“Yeah?”
“Call Dorian. Prep the jet. We’re going to Brooklyn.”
- Writer
