Chapter 945
A pause. Then a low chuckle. “Hello, son. Still playing detective? You’re looking in the wrong grave. That bullet — ask your friend Julian where it came from. Ask him about the Night of Long Knives.”
The line went dead.
Parker stared at the phone. “That was Dominic Thorne? From prison?”
“Or a recording,” Skye said, her mind already racing. “Or the Mastermind using a voice synthesizer to throw us off.”
“No,” Alistair said. His grip on the bullet tightened until his knuckles turned white. “That was him. He has a specific way of pausing. He’s communicating from inside. He knows we’re here.”
“He wants us to doubt Julian,” Skye said, staring at the bullet in Alistair’s hand. “He’s planting seeds.”
“Or he’s telling the truth,” Alistair said quietly. “Julian said the families built the vault together. Maybe they didn’t separate amicably.” He turned the bullet over, studying the Vance crest etched into the casing.
𝗥𝖾𝗮d 𝘵𝘩𝗲 𝗅𝘢𝘵e𝗌t 𝘁𝗋𝗲n𝘥𝗌 о𝗻 g𝘢𝗹𝗻𝗈𝘷𝘦𝗅s.𝘤𝗈m
“Julian has been helping us,” Skye said. “But he’s also been keeping secrets. He pushed us to come here. He knew what we would find.”
Alistair looked at her, his eyes catching the beam of the flashlight. “If Julian had anything to do with my father’s fall — or if he’s playing both sides…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The threat hung in the air, heavy and suffocating as the dust.
The monitor in Skye’s office at Oracle hummed with a low static buzz. On the screen, the footage of the parking lot attack played on a loop.
The black SUV surged. The door crumpled. Alistair shielded them.
Skye had watched it a hundred times. Her eyes felt gritty and raw from lack of sleep. The doubt planted by Dominic’s call was festering, growing roots in the silence.
“There,” she said, pointing at the timestamp. “Frames 1492 to 1495.”
Parker, seated at the keyboard, squinted. “It’s just a blur, Skye. Motion artifact.”
“No.” She leaned in. “The pixels don’t shift naturally. It’s a jump cut. Someone edited the feed before it was archived. Three frames, erased.”
“Who has access to the raw feed?” Alistair asked from the couch.
“Only Julian,” Parker said. “And me. And I didn’t do it.”
Skye turned to him. “Can you recover the ghost data? The buffer cache?”
“Maybe.” Parker’s fingers flew across the keys. “If the overwrite wasn’t a deep scrub… got it.”
The screen flickered. The missing frames surfaced.
It was the moment the attacking SUV passed the camera. The driver’s window was partially down. The face was blurry, but distinct enough.
It wasn’t Dominic Thorne. It wasn’t a random mercenary.
It was Travis Tate. Julian’s butler. The man who poured his tea. The man who had been operating as a triple agent, ostensibly in Julian’s service.
Silence crashed into the room.
“Travis?” Alistair stood, ignoring the pain in his arm. “Travis drove the car that tried to kill us?”
“I knew it,” Skye whispered — though the confirmation made the floor feel as though it were tilting beneath her. “This wasn’t the Mastermind. This wasn’t Dominic. This was Julian.”
“Why would Julian send his own man to attack us?” Alistair demanded. “Travis follows Julian’s orders. Exclusively.”
.