Chapter 8 - The Price of Blood
The shattered glass glistened under the pale Midtown moonlight like scattered diamonds, but no one moved to clean it up.
Victor Sterling stared at his daughter, his chest heaving as reality crashed down around him. He didn't look at Dante; he looked only at Evelyn, his eyes wide with a mix of terror and profound, agonizing guilt.
"You shouldn't be here," Victor whispered, taking a slow, trembling step forward. "Dante... whatever he told you, it's a lie. He's a monster who destroys everything he touches."
"The only monster in this room is the man who traded his daughter for encrypted hard drives and left her to grow up in a cramped apartment above a dry cleaner's," Evelyn said, her voice terrifyingly steady. She stepped past Dante, closing the distance between herself and the man who had given her his DNA but nothing else.
Victor flinched as if she had struck him across the face. "I left you there to keep you safe. If the Syndicate ever found you..."
"They found me," Evelyn interrupted, her eyes locking onto his with the cold, unyielding glare of a Bellamy. "Because you left my name as the master seed phrase in your stolen files. You didn't hide me to protect me, Victor. You hid me as an insurance policy in case your empire collapsed. I was your emergency exit."
Victor opened his mouth, but no words came out. He looked at Dante, who stood a few paces behind Evelyn, arms crossed over his chest, watching the scene unfold with absolute, unblinking detachment.
"Where are the remaining hard drives, Victor?" Dante asked, his voice cutting through the silence like a scalpel. "You have thirty seconds before I let Evelyn decide what kind of exit strategy you get."
Victor swallowed hard, his knees visibly trembling. He walked slowly toward a sleek, biometric wall safe hidden behind a modern art canvas. He pressed his palm against the scanner and punched a six-digit code into the keypad. The heavy steel door swung open, revealing three matte-black, military-grade storage drives resting on the velvet shelf inside.
He picked them up with shaking hands and turned around.
"Here," Victor said, holding them out toward Dante. "Take them. Take everything. Just... let her go. She has nothing to do with this war."
Dante didn't move to take the drives. Instead, he looked down at Evelyn.
Evelyn stepped forward, took the three hard drives from her biological father's trembling hands, and looked him dead in the eye.
"Fifty million dollars," Evelyn said softly. "That's what Dante paid for me at an underground auction house. Do you know why? Because that's the exact valuation of the damage you caused when you blew up his Newark hub."
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She dropped the hard drives one by one onto the shattered glass floor at their feet, the plastic casings cracking against the hardwood.
"We're even now, Victor," Evelyn said, her voice devoid of emotion. "And as for my name... I'm a Hart. I always have been."
