Chapter 859
Felix leaned in, his eyes widening. “Your family’s lost heirloom? I thought it was a myth. A story Arthur told to inflate his net worth.”
“It was real,” Skye said, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. “My father claimed it was stolen the night he died. Celeste had it all along. She stole my birthright.”
She picked up the stone. It was heavy, dense with history. She held it up to the halogen light, squinting past the brilliance.
“Where are the codes?” Felix asked urgently. “We need the prison schematics.”
“Look closer,” Skye whispered.
Inside the depths of the blue stone, faint and unnatural lines intersected. Laser etching. High-density optical storage.
“The gem is the drive,” Skye realized, a chill running down her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature. “She used the Sterling Sapphire as a physical encryption key. The data for the prison is etched inside the crystal lattice.”
Felix let out a slow breath. “Clever. And arrogant.”
Skye pocketed the gem, her hand trembling slightly. “We have the key. Now we need a reader capable of extracting it. Julian can build one.”
Her phone buzzed against the metal table — a jarring intrusion of the present into the past.
Skye glanced at the screen. Lucian Graves.
𝘔𝗼ѕ𝗍 𝗋е𝘢𝘥 𝗍𝗵i𝘀 𝘸e𝘦𝗸 𝘰ո 𝘨a𝗹ո𝗼𝗏𝘦ls.cо𝗺
“Speak,” she answered, her eyes still fixed on the empty velvet box.
“You need to come back.” Lucian’s voice was tight, the background noise of the Oracle war room chaotic behind him. “Now.”
“We just found the key to the Nevada site,” Skye said. “We’re preparing to —”
“Forget the extraction for a moment,” Lucian cut her off. “It’s Beatrice. She’s torching the company.”
Skye frowned. “Beatrice Kensington? I thought she was powerless. We stripped her voting rights.”
“She bypassed the board,” Lucian explained, his voice grim. “She’s liquidating the Kensington Family Trust. It’s a private entity, Skye — I can’t touch it legally. She’s dumping assets onto the market to trigger a panic, trying to force a liquidity crisis so she can buy back control at pennies on the dollar. She’s going to bankrupt Kensington Global by noon just to spite us.”
“Let her,” Skye said coldly. “Let it burn.”
“If the Trust collapses, the SEC freezes all associated accounts,” Lucian countered. “Including the private aviation subsidiaries Beatrice controls personally. The flight authorization logs for the plane that took Parker and Victoria are in those private records. If the feds freeze them, they get sealed for months. We lose the paper trail. We lose the location of the black site.”
Skye closed her eyes. She felt the weight of the sapphire in her pocket — the key to the lock. But without the location, the key was useless. “She’s forcing my hand.”
“She’s desperate,” Lucian said. “She’s asking for a meeting. With you.”
“Prepare the jet,” Skye said, her voice turning to steel. “We’re coming home.”
The flight back to Sea City was a blur of strategy and caffeine. When Skye stepped onto the tarmac, the humidity of the city hit her like a wet towel — salt, exhaust, and the threat of rain.