Chapter 4 - The Asset HuntBy 8:00 AM the next morning, my phone had finally died. When I plugged it into the charger in Caroline’s kitchen, it took three minutes for the screen to stabilize under the weight of the incoming data.
There were forty-two missed calls from my mother, seventeen from Ethan, and five from numbers registered to Bennett Holdings' corporate headquarters. But there was also one email from an address I didn't recognize: [email protected].
Emily, I have reviewed the files you uploaded to the university's local server before they were taken down by the administration's IT department. You have handed us the missing link. I need you in my office at the federal building at 10:00 AM. Do not come alone. Bring Caroline. — Sarah Vance, Assistant US Attorney.
Caroline was already awake, pouring black coffee into two ceramic mugs. She looked at the email over my shoulder and nodded. "I’ll drive. We need to stop by your apartment first to get your physical identification documents."
"No," I said, a sudden chill running down my spine. "If my father is out on bail, the first place his security team will go is my apartment. They’ll want my passport, my birth certificate—anything they can use to make it look like I’m trying to flee the country with their funds."
"We'll take a security detail from the university," Caroline insisted. "I’ve already spoken to the chief of campus police. He’s outraged by what happened on his watch yesterday."
An hour later, we arrived at my cramped, third-floor apartment on the east side of the city. The door was already unlocked.
The wood around the brass deadbolt was splintered, the lock hanging uselessly by a single screw. Inside, the apartment had been completely systematically dismantled. My mattress had been sliced open, my books cleared from the shelves and thrown into a pile in the center of the room, and my old desktop computer was gone, leaving only a tangle of severed wires on the desk.
"My God," Caroline whispered, covering her mouth as she stepped over the ruins of my small life.
I walked to the kitchen, where a single ceramic mug—the one my grandmother had given me before she died—lay shattered on the linoleum floor. Beneath the shards of porcelain was a sticky, dark substance. I bent down, my heart freezing.
It was red spray paint.
Scribbled across the white kitchen cabinets in jagged, angry letters was a single word:
TRAITOR
"They didn't find the passport," I murmured, my voice empty of emotion. "They were looking for the backup physical drive."
"Where is it, Emily?" Caroline asked, looking around the ruined room as if she expected my father’s men to jump out from the shadows.
"It's not here," I said, walking over to the small, rusted radiator in the corner of the living room. I reached behind the metal pipes, my fingers tracing the dusty baseboard until I found a loose piece of wood. I pried it open and pulled out a small, yellowed envelope. Inside was my birth certificate, my passport, and a secondary, encrypted micro-SD card wrapped in tinfoil.
"They think I'm a child who doesn't know how to hide things," I said, tucking the envelope into my jacket. "They forgot that I grew up in their house. I’ve been hiding my things from them since I was eight years old."
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As we walked out of the apartment, the campus police officer guarding the hallway received a transmission on his radio. He listened for a moment, his face hardening, before looking at me.
"Miss Bennett," the officer said. "We need to move now. Your father’s corporate attorneys just filed an emergency injunction at the county courthouse. They’re claiming you stole intellectual property and corporate funds, and they’ve requested a warrant for your arrest."
