The shadows in the corner of the small room began to shift. Sitting behind an old, broken wooden table illuminated only by the faint screen of a military-grade laptop was a young boy who looked no older than nine. He wore an oversized headset, his small fingers moving across a mechanical keyboard with dizzying, professional speed.
“Sofia, lock the door,” the boy said, his voice flat and completely devoid of childish fear. “He wasn’t followed, but we have thirty seconds before the regional ping resets.”
“Lena… who is this?” I stammered, stepping back as lines of green encryption code bounced across the child’s screen.
Lena pulled her frail body up from the bed, her trembling hands reaching out to grab mine. “Grant, you think I ran away because I stopped loving you. But ten years ago, I discovered what your brother, Marcus, was doing inside your family’s shipping empire. He wasn’t just running cargo. He was using your supply lines for international human trafficking and black-market organ trading.”
My chest tightened as if I had been struck by a physical blow. “Marcus? Marcus runs our family’s charitable foundation!”
“He framed me, Grant!” Lena sobbed, her tears soaking into my sleeve. “The night I disappeared, Marcus’s men came to our home to kill me because I had downloaded the master ledgers onto an encrypted drive. I ran to protect you and our unborn baby. I’ve spent twelve years living in the mud, changing our names every six months, just to keep Sofia and our son, Leo, alive.”
“Leo?” I whispered, looking toward the dark corner at the young boy whose fingers never stopped typing.
Sofia looked up at me, her eyes filled with a fierce, protective courage that made her look twenty years older. “I wasn’t selling oranges to buy medicine for Mom, Grant. The orange bags have micro-scanners built into the mesh bottom. Every day I walk through the financial district, I scan the encrypted keycards of your brother’s executives when they buy fruit from me. Leo uses the frequencies to crack Marcus’s offshore banking accounts.”
To see Grant help his children bring down his brother’s dark empire, continue reading below for Part 3...
