Chapter 14 – The First Strike
292 Words
We didn’t go to the police.
We didn’t trust anyone.
The moment that photo arrived, Lucien knew exactly what game we were playing.
And games like this didn’t end in courtrooms.
They ended in silence… or fire.
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That night, we went to the old Sinclair records office.
It had been closed for over a decade, but Lucien still had access.
In the basement—behind a false wall—were archives never meant to see daylight.
Lucien’s mother had mentioned a black ledger in one of her journal entries.
A book that contained transactions too dirty to make it into digital files.
And there it was.
Wrapped in fabric, buried behind stacks of old property contracts.
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Inside: names. Amounts. Signatures.
Money moved quietly to people who no longer existed on paper—lawyers, doctors, board members, even a judge.
And then… a page marked in red ink.
> Project Seraphim.
Confidential.
Initiated: Sinclair Holdings, 1991.
Status: Terminated.
Subject: Selene Aster Sinclair.
Lucien went still beside me.
“They didn’t just silence her,” I whispered.
“They studied her.”
He nodded once, as if trying not to unravel in front of me.
“They experimented on my mother?”
“They were afraid of her,” I replied.
“Because she was smarter than all of them. And she didn’t play by their rules.”
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We made copies.
Photos. PDFs. Scans to encrypted drives.
When we returned to the penthouse, Lucien said something that made my heart twist:
“I don’t care what happens to the name Sinclair anymore. I care what happens to you.”
And in that moment, I realized something terrifying:
We weren’t just chasing justice.
We were daring the empire to collapse.
Together.
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- Writer
