The Billionaire's Forbidden Kingdom (Empire of Desire #38)

Zara

THE SCREEN THREW blue light across Zara Al-Rashid’s face at two in the morning. Third coffee. Ninth hour. Her apartment in Brooklyn was quiet except for the hum of the server rack in the closet and the distant

wail of a siren on Atlantic Avenue.

She’d been tracking the intrusion for six days. Six days of following

a ghost through layers of encrypted tunnels, watching it slip between corporate firewalls like water through cracks. The target was Blackwood Systems—one of the largest private cybersecurity firms in the world. The kind of company that hired people like Zara to keep the wolves out.

The kind of company that, apparently, had wolves of its own.

She zoomed into the packet capture. The exploit was elegant. Too elegant for a common cybercriminal—whoever had written it understood Blackwood’s architecture from the inside. They’d left backdoors in places no outside attacker would know to look.

Backdoors built on code that felt familiar.

Zara leaned back. Her neck cracked. She stared at the ceiling, then at the photograph on her desk—a woman with dark eyes and a half-smile, standing in front of a whiteboard covered in equations. Nadia Al-Rashid. Her mother.

Dead eleven years now. A car accident on the Cross Island Parkway, according to the police report. A single-vehicle collision at 2 AM on a dry road with no other traffic. The report said distracted driving. Zara had been fourteen, and even then she’d known the math didn’t add up.

Her mother hadn’t been distracted a day in her life.

Ali Essam

Zara turned back to the screen. The exploit’s architecture nagged at her.

She’d seen patterns like this before—not in malware, but in her mother’s old research papers.

The way the payload wrapped around the authentication layer.

The way it used timing attacks that were almost poetic in their precision.

Nadia Al-Rashid had designed systems that thought like living things.

This exploit thought the same way.

Zara’s phone buzzed. An encrypted message on Signal, from a number she didn’t recognize.

*We know you’ve been watching the Blackwood breach.

The vulnerability is bigger than you think.

We need someone who understands the original architecture.

Someone who can read code that was never meant to be found.

The compensation is significant. The risk is real.

If you’re interested, the details are attached.

Damien Blackwood is waiting.*

Damien Blackwood. She’d read about him. The reclusive billionaire who’d built Blackwood Systems from nothing into a global empire. Magazine covers. Forbes lists. A face that appeared in photographs but never quite smiled.

She opened the attachment. A contract. Six figures for a three-month engagement. Full access to the company’s internal systems. A scope of work that read like someone had written it in a hurry—or in a panic.

Zara looked at her mother’s photograph again.

Blackwood Systems had been founded fifteen years ago. Her mother had died eleven years ago. Four years between the founding and the death. Four years that Nadia Al-Rashid had never spoken about, never mentioned, never explained.

Four years that Zara had spent wondering why her mother came home some nights smelling like someone else’s cologne, why she sometimes cried in the shower, why she’d once whispered I’m sorry into Zara’s hair while she thought her daughter was asleep.

Zara typed her reply.

I’m in.

She hit send before she could talk herself out of it. Then she closed the laptop, walked to the window, and looked out at the city that never stopped moving.

Somewhere out there, Damien Blackwood was waiting to tell her a story. Zara intended to hear every word of it. And if the truth turned out to be what she suspected—if her mother’s code lived inside the walls of his empire—then Zara would burn that empire down to its foundations to prove it.

She picked up her mother’s photograph and held it to the light. Mama, I’m coming.