Delia burst out of the club's heavy double doors and sucked in a lungful of humid air. The rain had slowed to a drizzle.
She dropped the shoulders. She let the 'confused girl' mask slide off her face. Her eyes went cold.
Her phone vibrated in her clutch. The screen flashed: Sterling.
She answered.
"Delia?" Her brother's voice was tight.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, then pitched her voice up an octave. "Sterling..." She let a wobble enter the word. "Ansel... he was so mean."
"What did that bastard do?" Sterling roared. As the second brother and the family's resident artist, Sterling's temperament was as volatile as his abstract paintings. He lacked Preston's cold logic or Foster's quiet menace, reacting instead with raw, protective emotion. "Where are you? I'm coming to get you."
"No," she sniffled. "I'm taking a cab. He... he said I made him sick. He called off the wedding."
"I'm going to kill him," Sterling growled.
"Just... let me come home," she whispered and hung up.
She stared at the phone. No tears. Just calculation.
She hailed a taxi. As she slid into the backseat, she pulled a slim black device from the lining of her purse. She connected it to her phone.
Her fingers flew across the screen.
Target: The Zenith Club Security Mainframe.
Status: Bypassing Firewall... Success.
She accessed the camera logs. She found the file labeled Garden_Cam_04. She watched herself slipping behind the statue. She watched the execution.
She hit Delete.
Data Scrubbing... 100%.
She leaned back against the worn seat of the taxi, exhaling. She knew this left a digital footprint-a void where data should be-but leaving the footage of her witnessing a murder was a death sentence. A glitch was safer than a confession.
High above the city, in the penthouse office of The Zenith Club, Killian Gibson sat on a leather sofa.
Ansel was pacing the room, still ranting about Delia's audacity. Killian wasn't listening. He was holding a tablet.
"Boss," his assistant, Dirk, said, stepping forward. "We have a problem with the security logs."
Killian didn't look up. "Let me guess. The footage from the garden is gone."
Dirk blinked. "Yes. Someone hacked the system. It was a remote wipe. Very clean. We can't trace the IP."
Ansel stopped pacing. "What? Someone hacked us?"
Killian smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of a man who had found a puzzle piece he didn't know was missing.
"She tried to erase it," Killian said. "She thinks she's safe."
"Who?" Ansel asked.
"Delia Fitzgerald." Killian tapped the screen. "She's not just a spoiled brat, Ansel. She's a professional."
"A professional what? Shopper?" Ansel scoffed.
Killian stood up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window. He looked down at the street, watching the yellow taxi disappear into the traffic.
He took a drag from his cigarette.
Killian narrowed his eyes. "A cat that knows how to sheathe its claws is far more intriguing than a lion."
