Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95046 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
I know this.
I know this.
Because I've done it before.
3
The Aventador purrs beneath me as I take the final curve toward home, so ready to start punishing my little Word Collector.
I lift off the accelerator when the gates come into view. The car slowing as unease creeps into the space anticipation occupied three seconds ago.
The gates are open.
They should not be open.
They should be closed.
Always.
Automated security protocols are part of my personal Ten Commandments. Motion sensors, cameras, and backup systems layered like redundancies in a hostile takeover.
Nothing stays open at my house without permission.
Until now, apparently.
The mansion rises against the night sky, a Victorian Gothic silhouette in blood-red stone that usually greets me with uplighting on the arches and a soft glow from the foyer visible through leaded glass.
Tonight it's completely dark.
Every window, every external fixture—dead.
I park and kill the engine. Silence drops like a curtain.
Nothing but the cold Pennsylvania quiet and the sound of my own breathing.
I exit the Aventador and approach the house. The front door is cracked open. I can't even explain the feeling in my gut right now. It's absolute dread bordering on the verge of panic.
I blow out a breath, then push it open and step into the foyer.
Motion sensors should be flooding the space with light.
Nothing.
I pull my phone, activate the flashlight, and sweep the beam across marble floors and antique furniture arranged like set pieces in a museum no one's visiting.
Everything looks untouched.
I move down the main hallway toward the back of the house, toward the door that leads to the basement. Halfway down the corridor my foot kicks something.
I stumble, catching myself against the wall with my free hand, phone jerking in the other. The beam sweeps wildly before I steady it and aim down.
The Little Prince lies face-up on the floor.
The words to describe what I'm feeling right don't even exist.
I pick up the book and look down the hallway. My eyes land on the far end of the house—the library.
Why is this book on the floor?
I straighten, swinging the phone's beam in a wider arc.
Metal glints a few feet away.
A key.
But not just a key.
The key.
It rests against the baseboard like it skidded there and stopped. Small, and brass, and offering exactly what I promised—freedom whenever she wanted it.
She used the key. Came upstairs. Took the book.
My brain catalogues possibilities with the efficiency of a spreadsheet sorting data into columns labeled 'likely', 'possible', and 'you're fucked'.
She finally decided to leave. Took the money, the passport, the fresh start I gift-wrapped and left waiting. She waited until I was away at Sunday dinner and left quietly. No scene, no crying, no goodbyes… the freedom I told her she could claim any time.
The thought should bring relief—one less witness, one less liability, one less person I have to protect from Luca LaRiccia's inevitable questions about his missing degenerate son.
But that's not what happened here.
There is no relief because my phone light catches another glint of metal down the hall. Shoved against the wall is the case.
I walk over, pick it up, and then thumb the latches and click it open.
Sixty-three thousand dollars in banded stacks stare back at me.
The passport with Emmaleen's new name, photo, and a birth date that makes her two years younger.
The plane ticket to anywhere, date open, private and untraceable.
She didn't take the case.
She didn't leave.
Which means someone else opened these gates, cut my power, and came inside.
I move fast toward the control room, each step cataloging details—no alarm trigger, no smashed glass, no signs of forced entry anywhere. Whoever did this had access codes or better.
Professional override.
The control room door is unlocked. I push inside and the darkness swallows everything except the faint glow from my phone.
I sweep the beam across the wall of monitors.
Every screen is black.
Not sleeping. Not dimmed. Dead.
I tap a keyboard. Nothing. Try the backup console. Still nothing.
The entire network—more than a dozen high-definition feeds, thermal overlays, motion sensors, perimeter alerts—systematically shut down from the outside.
I grab for the laptop I keep stowed inside a built-in cabinet beneath the main console, yank it free, flip it open. The screen floods bright white, and I blink against the sudden light, pupils contracting hard enough to hurt.
Password typed. Enter.
Local network infrastructure loads—routers, nodes, circuit diagrams.
Everything offline.
I've got a backup power system designed to outlast a three-day blackout. Industrial-grade battery array with solar redundancy and a diesel generator that kicks in automatically if both fail. The fact that it's all offline means this wasn't a simple breaker trip or grid failure.
This was a total hack.
Professional.
Military-grade penetration.
I don't think the name.
I don't.
I refuse.
I do not.
It comes anyway.
LaRiccia.
The only people both capable of this kind of operation and with a reason to do it.
They don't know. They can't know.
Dom and Ricky have been running the deepfake religiously for weeks—Rico posting vacation photos from Manila, Bangkok, Ko Samui. Smiling in club mirrors. Flashing cash at blackjack tables. Fucking Instagram models with geotags proving he's alive and indulgent and exactly where rich assholes go to disappear for a month.