I had moved the real assets, every dollar, into a blind structure he had never controlled and did not know existed.

He was stealing from a decoy.

He just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter 10 — The Duress System

The center of it, the thing I was proudest of, was a piece of my father’s old caution turned into a machine.

Because I knew that someday it would come down to a moment — a room, a demand, a document, my own hand forced to authorize something.

Men like Charles and Nathan always, in the end, need the victim’s own signature; it is the one thing they cannot forge past a certain point, the live consent of the person they’re robbing.