Vengeance in velvet

The Phantom Assets

Seraphina’s POV

The air was the sour taste of copper, static and cold dust. This subterranean bunker, under the city, surrounded by heavy concrete walls and absolute silence was the last place on Earth where I could breathe without feeling the crushing weight of my former life haunting me like a ghost.

I dragged my thumb over the jagged scar that ran across my jaw, across my free speech, across my name, across my dignity, and across my freedom. Three years ago they threw me in the dark, expecting me to rot. But they assumed that a broken woman would remain broken, that she would be thrown on the refuse heap with an out-of-date contract.

They had no idea that fear withers when all you've ever loved is taken away.

I approached the huge glass monitors, which lined the curved wall. In the room there was only the gentle soothing sound of the liquid-cooled servers working in rhythm. I placed my right palm on the biometric glass on the main console. There was silence, followed by a faint blue glow that lit up the glass.

Welcome back, Seraphina.

A silly, unfulfilling pain litched at the back of my ribs, a sudden memory of sterile hospital beds, crying into paper-thin blankets at night and the burning months of physical therapy when every step I took was like slicing through shattered glass and scraping my feet. As they toasted to my complete ruin in their penthouse rooms, celebrating with vintage champagne, I was lying in dark rooms, watching my life drip away onto cold linoleum floors.

But, I had learned during all those long nights, pain is a terrible master and a magnificent fuel.

Every night I couldn't sleep, I traded, that was almost every night.

I fired up a bunch of ghost servers, connected them with encrypted proxies and created a fake identity using digital ashes, and then I used all the scraps of money that I managed to smuggle out of my old life into volatile offshore markets. I didn't trade for a nice little pension fund; I traded as a woman who is dying with nothing that much to lose. Took risks that seasoned fund managers would be too afraid to consider; had a quiet desperation.

I knocked on the main screen and the dark glass turned into light.

The data cascaded down on the screen, like neon rain. Chains of offshore holding companies, blind trusts, shell companies in Zurich, Cayman and Singapore. The numbers grew, unabated and green, into a final Net in my main phantoms.

$142,850,000.

The digits were glowing and I tightened my throat. It was a tremendous fortune, more than enough to purchase a private island, more than enough to vanish off to some beach in the sun and spend my days in quiet luxury. For a split instant, the weak and weary side of me said:

Run. Take it and run. You survived. Isn't that enough?

Then my eyes were filled with the faces of those who betrayed me. I recalled Julian's cold and dismissive smirk as he signed the papers that wiped away my legacy. I could still recall my sweet, venomous sister whispering in my ear just before the security guards dragged me away.

“You were never a man for our family, Seraphina.”

There was a bitter laugh that bubbled in my chest, hollow and sharp. Those three years of hell stole from me, and there's no money in the world that can get them back. It could not mend my broken trust, or wipe away the fear of gazing at myself in the mirror and not seeing the real me in the eyes of the holloweyed ghost. There was a wound in my jaw and a wound in my soul and money would not heal them.

However, money may be used to construct a hammer, If I got enough of it I could crush their golden world to dust.

“Softness is dead,” I whispered to the empty room, my voice firm, without the shyness that had been a girl.

"You made sure of that."

The mechanical keyboard seemed to hum with a gunshot precision as my fingers started hitting the keys. I turned on my encrypted communications matrix: a ghost network of nodes that none of the government or corporate security service could trace. The warning lights started to turn from amber to a bright green flashing light, one at a time.

Matrix Active. Node 01: Geneva – Connected. Node 02: London – Connected. Node 03: Tokyo – Connected. Security Level: Zero-Trace.

My heart beat wildly against my ribs, pounding hard, furiously, and rapidly, so that my fingers started to tingle. This was the limit. I broke this door open and there's no going back. No quiet life. No peaceful sunrises. Only fire.

I called up the target matrix. Three main profiles came to life on the screens, each with their own live surveillance feed, private financial books, wire-tapped audio logs and offshore accounts.

Julian Vance was the first name, my ex-fiancé and the architect that was responsible for my money execution. His current location was a luxury downtown steakhouse, he was presently sitting in, laughing, holding a two-hundred dollar bottle of wine that he stole from me, which was paid for by the company I stole from. I saw his face and it was pure and unspoiled venom that went through me. I could feel my stomach turning a little bit, a bit of sadness for the girl he loved, and pure anger for the monster he created.

I opened his main liquidity pool, a leveraged hedge fund, and it's a buying/shorting trade that he's heavily shorting on a secret trade that he is going to do next week and it is very illegal and will be done in a secret manner. He believed no one was aware of this. He thought that he couldn't get injured up there.

“Safe up there, in the clouds, Julian,” I whispered, my finger tracing his smiling face, as he looked down to gaze upon me.

But the clouds are just water, And I'm about to make it rain.

I started the script that was injected. The ten million dollar price of one of my phantom accounts commenced quietly draining his margin buffer with a single keypress; he was set up with a financial tripwire that would be triggered when he would make his trade. It was only the blood in the water that would bring the sharks in, it wouldn't kill his empire yet.

It was a rush that matched no drug I had ever been prescribed after my recovery, the adrenaline was so strong. My sadness was turning into precision, like a knife. All the tears I had shed in the dark, all the bits of my lip that I bit to stop from screaming were now all raw digital firepower.

My fingers poised over the execute key, I brought my cursor closer to the next target, my sister's supply chain.

Suddenly a loud and abrupt ping rang out in the hub.

I froze.

At the top corner of my main display screen a red warning light came on. This wasn't a warning of an attack from my attack script. It was a warning of the violation that I received on my internal, air-gapped server a server that includes my real identity, where I live, and my medical records.

I had a breath caught in my throat. I felt cold perspiration running down the back of my neck.

Traced? How? That's impossible.

I threw my hands into the console and quickly pulled up the intrusion logs. The code was making an impossible speed, even though it passed my secondary firewalls as if it already had the encryption keys.

After a flicker of a red warning screen, it disappeared and was replaced with a simple black terminal window.

Suddenly, my screen started to type one character at a momentary time:

There's a nice financial matrix, Seraphina. But I forgot about the camera that's on the top of the front door. Look behind you.