The revelation hung in the air, sharp and electric. We were inside their vault.
The shock that had frozen the room quickly turned into a cold, focused intensity. The grief that had weighed down Dante's shoulders vanished. In its place was the determined energy of a general who had just received the enemy's master plan. He was no longer the son seeking revenge for a lost life; he was the heir to a war, and he had just found the way to victory.
"Nyx," he said, his voice low and dangerous. "I need to know what's inside that firm. What was Finch selling? Why was the London Edict desperate to buy it?"
"I'm on it," Nyx replied, her fingers a blur on her console. The main screen in the war room, which had shown the list of assets, transformed into a complex wall of shifting data. "Finch was a digital ghost, but he also had his routines. He founded Alistair & Finch. He built their original servers from scratch. If he was keeping a second set of books, a hidden digital stash, he would have tucked it away in the one place he truly claimed as his."
"Their internal servers," I said, racing to stand beside her. I knew that system. I had spent weeks in it. "It's old, tangled, and relies on a dozen different outdated platforms. It's a digital nightmare, a perfect hiding spot."
"Exactly," Nyx grinned, her eyes shining with excitement. "Dante's purchase gave us top-level administrative access. The Syndicate tried to enter through the front door with their purchase, but we already own the building and have the master keys."
She pulled up a schematic of the A&F server setup. "I'm running a thorough diagnostic, searching for partitioned drives, hidden rootkits, anything out of the ordinary."
"Focus on the archives," I instructed, pointing to part of her map. "The 'Rivera Case' files I was working on. That's the oldest section of the network—the original server from when Finch first started the firm. It's where he would have stored his personal files."
"Good thinking, boss," Nyx said, shifting her focus. The diagnostic ran, sifting through terabytes of old case files. For a minute, the room fell silent, with only the soft tapping of her keys and the hum of the servers breaking the quiet.
And then she found it.
A single file, so large it occupied a huge, partitioned section of the server, yet so perfectly concealed it was invisible to regular users. Its file name was a random string of 64 characters.
"Hello, beautiful," Nyx whispered. "It's a digital vault. A compressed, encrypted archive. This isn't just a file; it's a fortress."
"Can you open it?" Dante asked, his voice tense.
"Not easily," Nyx replied, her brow furrowing in concentration. "This goes beyond military-grade security. This is personal. I'd call it a dead man's switch or a golden parachute. Finch intended to use this to protect himself from the Syndicate if they ever turned on him."
"It's the Curator's Hoard," Elias said, his voice filled with quiet awe. "The real Devil's Ledger. Not just what Dubois knew, but everything. Decades of blackmail, financial records, names, orders. It's the Syndicate's entire operational history."
The weight of our discovery hung over us. This was it. This could be the weapon to end the war.
"Nyx," Dante ordered. "Break it."
"This isn't something you can kick in, boss," she warned. "This is a bank vault. If I start a brute-force attack, it could take days or weeks. And it'll be loud. Digitally speaking. Whoever is on the other side will know the second I touch this. They'll know we're at the door."
"Good," Dante said, a slow, cold smile appearing. "Let them. Let the serpent know we have our knife at its heart. Begin."
Nyx took a deep breath. "Alright. Everyone hold on. I'm launching the first strike."
She pressed "Enter," setting her decryption algorithm in motion. The screens filled with lines of code as her program began to assault the vault.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, chaos erupted all at once.
Every screen in the war room—the main wall, our laptops, even Dante's secure phone—flickered and went dark. A collective gasp filled the room. The only light came from the emergency lights on the ceiling.
"What is this?" Aria whispered, grabbing my arm. "A power outage?"
"No," Nyx said, her voice low and stunned. "This isn't a power cut."
One by one, the screens flickered back to life. But they weren't showing our data anymore. They displayed a single, massive, coiling symbol, glowing in a sickly digital green.
The Ouroboros. The serpent eating its own tail.
"They're in our network," Elias said, his face pale. "That's impossible."
"They're not just in the network," Nyx said, her hands rapidly moving over her now-unresponsive keyboard. "They're in the room."
A small, tinny sound, like an old speakerphone, crackled from the main console. A new voice filled the room. It was not the refined tone of Alistair Finch; this voice was young, cold, and carried an air of arrogance.
"Mr. Moretti. A bold move. You've managed, in a single day, to cost us two decades of work, a senior asset, and our most valuable private ledger."
Dante stood in the center of the room, a statue of pure, cold fury.
"Who is this?" he demanded.
"Think of me as the person who just inherited your father's mess," the voice replied. "The Curator was an old sentimental fool. I am not. You have something that belongs to us. Teams are on their way to your location. This is not a negotiation. You have sixty seconds to power down your system, surrender the ledger, and deliver Miss Rossi to the vehicle waiting for you. Or we will level this building to its foundations. Your move."
The line went dead. The Ouroboros symbol pulsed on the screens, a silent, glowing heartbeat. A digital clock appeared in the corner, its red numbers stark and terrifying: 60:00.
They weren't just knocking on the door. They had just kicked it in.