Chapter 30 Erryn
ERRYN
The penthouse felt wrong when it was empty.
I hadn’t realized how much life furniture gave a place until the movers started carrying the last of it out, leaving behind bare floors and hollow rooms that echoed with every step.
The silence that followed felt cold and stripped of warmth—as lifeless as Claire had been when I found her.
Matilda stood in the hallway speaking quietly to one of the men about the final crate while I remained in the center of the living room, a tablet balanced in one hand as I watched the funeral unfold on the screen.
Octavia Vanguard’s funeral.
The irony was almost funny.
White roses filled the cathedral in suffocating abundance, candles burning in long rows beneath the vaulted ceilings as the camera swept across the mourners who gathered to grieve a woman they had barely known.
Politicians. Socialites. Former classmates.
Every one of them performing sorrow for the cameras with the same careful precision.
The coffin had appeared on the screen, and I leaned against the kitchen counter and into a patch of sunlight, warming my back, as the pallbearers began their slow walk down the aisle. My eyes scanned the crowd. No William.
Fucking Coward.
I straightened slightly, frowning as one of the men stepped away from the coffin and gestured toward the side.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the camera angle shifted, and I saw it.
A thin streak of red rolling down the polished white wood.
People began gathering around it, confusion spreading through the crowd as several men moved closer to inspect the side.
Someone reached for the lid.
I pushed away from the counter without realizing I’d moved, the tablet tightening in my grip as the livestream flickered between camera angles while the room inside the cathedral descended into chaos as the lid was opened.
At first, the camera didn’t show what was inside, then it cut to a closer angle and the world stilled around me.
William Vanguard lay inside his daughter’s coffin.
What remained of him.
I had seen many violent deaths in my life and been responsible for many more.
The bloodbath inside that coffin had been done with the kind of vicious cruelty that could only be born from deep hatred. His body had been dismantled with clinical precision, the pieces arranged inside the casket around his torso, with a message carved loud and clear in the pale flesh.
RAPIST
The word carved into his chest gleamed wetly under the cathedral lights, and the room around me seemed to tilt as I saw something beneath it. A betrayal carved as much into my own flesh as that word was.
A green three-pointed crown sprayed in paint. Theo’s calling card.
The breath left my lungs slowly, and for several seconds, I simply stared at the screen even after the feeds were cut and the screens went blank.
Matilda stepped into the room behind me. “Ms. Loxley?” she said cautiously. “The movers have finished—”
“Stop.”
My voice was quiet enough that she froze, and I lowered the tablet, my mind already racing several moves ahead.
Vanguard’s fucking failsafe.
Theo Lancaster just murdered the man who held my entire life’s work in his hands. She’d known the consequences and had thrown me to the fucking wolves anyway.
I closed my eyes in pure, exhausted disbelief as Matilda shifted uneasily, the creak of her shoes echoing in the empty room.
“Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” I said calmly. “Everything.”
Vanguard’s files would be released to the NCA once whatever systems in place reported his death, and the Triarchy wouldn’t just collapse. Every person connected to it would burn.
Including me.
I logged into the Triarchy network, relieved to find the system still active as the familiar interface flickered to life across the tablet in my hands, the encrypted layers unfolding one by one until I reached the deepest administrative tier and pulled up the protocol I never believed I’d need to use.
SCORCHED EARTH.
I’d written it into the system when I was promoted to Chair as a final safeguard in case the organization was ever compromised beyond recovery.
One command would trigger it.
The Head, Chairs, and every level one agent still tied to the Triarchy’s internal network would receive the same alert simultaneously, bypassing all encryption layers and secure channels.
Full system failure. Destroy sensitive assets, sever operational ties, and disappear immediately. It would delete the Triarchy from existence as much as possible. Give us some chance to hide from the shitstorm coming for us.
I simply stared at the confirmation screen, the blinking cursor waiting patiently for my command as the empty apartment echoed softly around me.
This was it.
The end of everything.
I was no one without everything I’d built.
My phone rang suddenly, startling me so much I nearly dropped it, and I blinked at the withheld number for a long moment before answering it on autopilot.
“Loxley.” I barely recognized my own voice.
“Is this Erryn?”
I frowned, still eyeing the button on the tablet in front of me.
“Who is this?”
There was a long silence followed by a shaky breath. “Octavia Vanguard.”
I could not take any more today. The world tilted, my knees gave out, and I slid down the cabinet to sit on the floor.
“Hello?” Octavia’s voice echoed faintly from the phone, and I pulled it back to my ear, trying to gather myself.
“You have impressive timing,” I said flatly. “Care to explain how you are not dead?”
“I saw the stream,” she said quickly, the words tumbling out as though she was forcing them past a rising tide of panic. “And before you hang up, I need you to listen to me because I know what you’re about to do.”
My gaze slid slowly back to the screen where the cursor blinked patiently beside the execute command.
“You know nothing,” I replied coolly.
“The failsafe,” she said. “Theo told me about it.”
She had my attention. “You’re surprisingly well informed for someone who has been pretending to be a corpse for the last week.”
“Erryn,” she said, her voice tightening. “Please, I can stop it.”
The words hung between us for a moment as my gaze dropped to the tablet again, then back to the empty room around me.
“You’re going to need a slightly better sales pitch than that.”
“It’s my code.”
That made me pause. “What?”
“The Vanguard system,” she said quickly. “All of it. I wrote the code Vanguard tech is built on.”
I couldn’t speak.
“My father didn’t build that system,” she continued quietly.
“He stole it. I developed the architecture when I was nineteen, and he quickly realized how useful it would be to someone in his position. He stole it and has paid for my silence ever since. It’s why he tried to have me killed. A convenient answer to a loose end.”
I could hear movement on her end of the line, the faint sounds of people talking in the background. She was somewhere public.
“You said you could stop it,” I said finally.
“I can,” she replied. “The release trigger runs through a mirrored authentication loop buried in the core code. If the system registers his death, it automatically activates the dump, but I’m the only person who can access the backdoor that overrides it. You don’t have long.”
My fingers tightened slightly around the tablet.
“And why,” I asked softly, “would you do that for me?”
“To protect Theo,” she blurted, stumbling over her words. “I know exactly what you will do to her when you find her, Erryn.”
I didn’t bother denying it, even if the thought ripped my already shredded heart out.
“So, here’s the deal,” she said, the tremor returning to her voice now that she had reached the part she was clearly dreading. “I’ll shut it down if you let Theo walk. She won’t even know until it’s over. She thinks I’m on a flight right now.”
I scoffed to cover my pain as I felt Theo’s metaphorical knife slowly turning in my back.
She had known. She had hidden all of this from me.
“You’re asking me to forgive the woman who just detonated the organization I’ve spent half my life building?”
“Yes!” Octavia said fiercely. “I can’t disappear knowing she’s going to spend the rest of her life running from you.”
My eyes drifted once more to the blinking command on the tablet.
“Erryn, I’m also the only person alive who can stop that system from destroying you.”
“You have a deal,” I said. “Where are you?”