Chapter1
The headline hit me before my coffee did."Cole & Sons Bank Scandal Rocks Global Markets: Missing Funds, Deaths Under Investigation."I read it twice. Then a third time. The words didn't change.My father's name sat in the second paragraph like a verdict — not accused outright, but placed there carefully, surgically, the way you'd leave a knife on a table without touching it. The reporters were smart. They didn't have to say guilty. They just had to say Cole.I shut the laptop.My hands were shaking.Outside my apartment window, Lagos was already awake and indifferent — hawkers calling out, okadas weaving through traffic, the city grinding forward like nothing had collapsed overnight. But inside these four walls, everything had. My mother's line was dead when I called. My father's phone rang out. My cousins — unreachable. In the span of ten minutes, the entire network I had trusted with my life went silent.Then the message came.Anonymous. No sender. Just seven words on my screen:"You have 48 hours. Do not resist."I dropped my phone on the counter.I had spent eight years building a reputation on precision — tracing financial crimes, exposing corruption for clients who couldn't afford to be exposed themselves. Numbers were my language. Patterns were my instinct. I had always been the one watching, never the one being watched.Until now.I was still standing there, back against the wall, heart hammering, when the knock came.Three slow raps. Deliberate. Unhurried. The knock of someone who already knew I was home.I didn't move.The silence stretched. Then a voice — low, measured, and completely calm — came through the door."Miss Cole. I won't knock again."Not a threat. Worse than a threat. A statement of fact.I crossed the room and opened the door.He was tall — the kind of tall that filled a doorframe without trying. Dark suit, no tie, the first button of his shirt undone like the meeting was already beneath him. His face was sharp angles and cold patience, the face of a man who had learned long ago that waiting was just another form of control. He looked at me the way people look at a problem they've already solved."Elias Ashcroft," he said, though I already knew the name. Everyone in finance knew that name. "We need to talk about your father."I lifted my chin."I don't know you.""No." The ghost of something — not quite a smile — crossed his mouth. "But I know everything about you, Seraphina. And right now, that makes me the most useful person alive."He held out a single white envelope.I didn't take it."What's in it?" I asked.His eyes — dark, unreadable — held mine for a moment longer than necessary."Your only way out."The city hummed behind him. The clock on my wall ticked. And somewhere in the back of my mind, the part that had survived every calculated risk, every impossible case — that part whispered one quiet, terrifying word:Run.I took the envelope.
