25. Ivy
IVY
T he door to the co-working loft clicks shut behind us, muffling the drone of traffic outside.
Inside, everything smells faintly of printer toner, strangely comforting in a way that reminds me of deadlines and adrenaline.
Sienna walks ahead, her boots echoing against the polished concrete, her posture tight and efficient.
Rosenthal’s already waiting, backlit by the glow of three monitors, sleeves rolled to her elbows like she hasn’t slept in days.
"You came armed," Sienna says, nodding at the tangle of cables and blinking drives.
Rosenthal doesn’t look up. "I don’t get dressed without encryption. You have what I need?"
I nod, pulling the slim flash drive from my coat pocket and handing it over. It contains Derek’s threat recordings, the photos he tried to bait me with, and a few files Sienna helped pull from her own archived inbox, emails that might connect Derek to someone already under federal scrutiny.
"Good," Rosenthal mutters. "Because I’ve been peeling through Derek’s digital trail, and let’s just say, your ex-fiancé? He’s not just shady. He’s a walking subpoena."
I glance at Sienna, whose mouth twitches. "Told you."
While Rosenthal works, I perch on the edge of a worn velvet chair and try to slow my pulse.
But my brain won’t settle. It drifts, traitorously, back to Jack.
His hands, his mouth, the way his voice went gravel-rough when he said my name like it meant something sacred.
My thighs press together involuntarily. I remember the last time he kissed me, slow and possessive, like he already knew I’d try to run and was trying to mark me with the memory of it.
A hot ache pulses low in my belly, just under the edge of everything else.
And then, an image: the blue button-down shirt he wore when we first met. Wrinkled from the plane, sleeves shoved to his elbows, ink on his cuff. He’d offered it to me once when I was shivering on a balcony, and I’d worn it for hours, pretending it didn’t smell like him. I never gave it back.
"Earth to Ivy," Sienna says, nudging my knee. "You’re thinking about him again."
"Of course I am."
She smirks, then softens. "We’ll get him back. The truth will level this."
Rosenthal turns from the screen. "We’ve got a hit. One of Derek’s encrypted folders was cloned two months ago. From an IP address tied to a private server in Zurich. Jack’s team must be close."
"Can we access it?" I ask.
"Not without triggering an alert," Rosenthal says. "But if someone on your side is already in Zurich, I can piggyback on their access if they give me a ghosted mirror. We’d need that link. Fast."
Sienna sends a message to Claudia Mercado, a cybersecurity analyst she once worked with during a high-profile corporate takedown.
Claudia was part of an auxiliary team with a reputation for digital stealth, someone who valued discretion, burned bridges for justice, and never stayed anywhere long enough to leave footprints.
It's been years, but if anyone could ghost a system and leave no trace, it’s her.
We pose the ask as a routine inquiry: access to a mirrored drive for a dormant Zurich asset, phrased so blandly it could be mistaken for bookkeeping. The language is dry, sterile, and deliberately boring. Minutes pass. The cursor blinks like it’s holding its breath.
Then a ping. The reply is short, unsigned: Thirty minutes. Don’t contact again.
Sienna shows me the screen, her expression unreadable. "She’s in, and if Claudia’s in, she’ll move fast and clean. We won’t get a second chance."
Rosenthal nods. "That’s our window. Once I’m in, I can extract everything. Emails. Transfers. Threats. Enough to bury him."
A weight presses into my ribs. Hope, sharp and terrifying.
“We need more than scandal," I say. "We need motive and method. If we can prove Derek used blackmail to manipulate a foundation’s funding or falsify a political tie, anything federal, we don’t just burn him in the press. We get legal firepower."
"So we trap him in the truth," Sienna adds. "And not just any truth, the kind that burns bridges he can’t rebuild."
Rosenthal turns back to her screens, fingers flying. "Give me ten minutes. If Claudia ghosts the mirror without detection, I’ll find the hook. Something admissible."
I rise, pacing now. "What about the foundation grants? If he siphoned donor money into his private accounts…”
"Then we’ve got fraud. Possibly RICO if we connect it to shell companies."
The room shifts. Purpose sharpens everything.
A plan forms between us in real time. We expose Derek’s funneling of funds from nonprofit accounts into international holdings.
We trace the digital breadcrumbs to a series of shell corporations registered in fake names.
We deliver the whole thing, with timestamps, authorizations, and encrypted messages, to the investigative journalist Jack trusts.
And then we walk into court, not with hearsay, but with a digital smoking gun.
To ensure full coverage, Rosenthal starts building two parallel dossiers, one for prosecution, one for the press. One will trigger the media storm. The other, if we’re lucky, opens a legal case federal prosecutors can’t ignore.
I grab a legal pad, flipping to a blank page just to have something to hold.
There’s ink smudged on the corners of my fingers.
I hadn’t even realized I’d been writing, names, timelines, arrows connecting foundation dollars to Derek’s shell firms like I’m drawing a map out of hell.
My handwriting is uneven. My thoughts sharper than they’ve been in weeks.
Behind me, Sienna dials a contact she hasn't spoken to in two years, a white-collar litigator who once took down a hedge fund mogul with a single subpoena. They exchange cold pleasantries, then get to work outlining what it would take to initiate discovery. It’s all code and legalese, but the intensity in Sienna’s voice makes it clear: we’re not bluffing.
Rosenthal’s screen flashes. Claudia has delivered the mirror.
The files start downloading, silent, fast, damning.
The loft falls quiet except for the hum of machinery.
Outside the windows, Manhattan stretches in a river of neon and blur.
Inside, time feels suspended, held together by code and caffeine and sheer willpower. My lungs tighten.
Then the buzzer sounds.
Sienna moves instinctively, but Rosenthal stiffens. "We didn’t buzz anyone in."
I stand. "Do you have security?"
"Cameras only. No guards."
The monitor by the door flashes.
A man stands on the stoop. Hat pulled low. Face obscured.
Rosenthal frowns. "That’s not one of ours."
Sienna checks her phone. "No one from our side pinged this location. This isn’t friendly."
I don’t move. He tilts his head toward the camera with a subtle precision that makes my stomach tighten. It’s too intentional, too pointed, he wants us to see him. This isn’t just a visit. It’s a calculated signal, one meant to unsettle. A warning without words.
"Lock the door," I say quietly.
Rosenthal presses the lock with a sharp, decisive movement.
The surveillance feed vanishes from the screen, replaced by an empty flicker of static.
In an instant, the tenuous lead we thought we had evaporates, replaced by the creeping certainty that we’ve just been outmaneuvered.
Our advantage is gone. We’re vulnerable now, and worse, Derek is no longer playing catch-up. He’s waiting.
Rosenthal’s voice slices through the tension. “We need to finish the upload. Whatever happens next, this data has to live somewhere safe.”
Sienna grabs her bag and unzips a secondary drive. “Backup protocol?”
“Encrypted triple-mirror. I’ll upload one to a secure offshore vault, one to a local ghost server, and one to an air-gapped machine I’ll physically relocate tonight.”
I nod, swallowing hard. “We’re staying ahead of him. Even now.”
But even as I say it, my eyes flick back to the door. The silence isn’t passive. It’s watching.
Rosenthal’s hand hovers an inch above the keyboard, just a beat too long. Her jaw tightens, only slightly, but I see it. She’s rattled. And if Rosenthal’s rattled, we’re closer to the edge than I want to admit.
It knows we’re close to burning everything down. And I wonder if that’s what Derek fears most, three women, one plan, and the resolve to dismantle his empire piece by piece. Not this time.
The monitors blink again. Static. Then darkness. Rosenthal swears under her breath and reboots the surveillance feed. Nothing. Just black. For a second, no one speaks.
Sienna moves to the blinds, adjusting them just enough to peer through. “He’s gone.”
But I don’t believe it. My skin prickles. The room feels colder somehow. Like the moment you realize you’re not alone, even when no one’s in sight.
Rosenthal scrubs through the last ten seconds of footage. “He knew where the cameras were. Angled himself just out of range. That wasn’t an accident.”
My throat is dry. “You think he disabled the feed?”
“No. I think he wanted us to know he could.”
Outside, the city hums like business as usual. Horns, footsteps, voices. But up here, the air feels tight. Contained.
I grip the edge of the desk until my knuckles ache.
We’re not being paranoid. We’re being hunted.
And now, the clock’s ticking. And yet, for one suspended moment, I don’t move.
None of us do. The machines hum. The air conditioner kicks on like a warning sigh.
I swear I can hear my pulse in my ears. Every instinct tells me to run.
But I don’t. Because this isn’t over. Derek doesn’t know it yet, but we’ve already struck the match.
Let him watch. Let him wait. We’re not the ones who should be afraid. Not anymore. Not when the truth is finally on our side.