Back at the hotel, Beatrice was hyperventilating, her emerald gown stained with sweat and panic.

Trembling, she crept to the penthouse window and peered through the blinds, desperate for a sign of rescue.

She expected morning traffic. Instead, her breath hitched. Parked in a flawless, impenetrable perimeter around the base of the hotel, boxing in every exit, were two dozen identical black SUVs.

And climbing out of the lead vehicle, in windbreakers stamped with three letters, were federal agents. At that exact second, Silas lifted the localized signal blocker for precisely three seconds.

A single text pushed through to Beatrice’s phone. It read: Time to pay your debts. Before she could scream, before she could even drop the phone, there was a heavy, official knock at the penthouse door.

Chapter 4: The Reckoning

The extraction wasn’t a raid. It was a surrender wrapped in a bow. Dominic had spent the overnight hours doing what he did better than anyone alive: making sure that when the machinery of the law finally moved, it moved with the force of an avalanche and none of the usual hesitation.

The evidence package—Lily’s medical documentation, the hotel footage, the fire-escape logs, the recorded confessions, and the deed-transfer document with Preston’s own handwriting demanding the property under threat—had been delivered to a state prosecutor who owed Dominic nothing but who could not, in good conscience or good career sense, ignore a case this airtight.