He Found His 6-Year-Old Son Scrubbing a Glass Roof—Then Realized His Wife Had Been Torturing Him All Along / Chapter 15 / 20

Chapter 15 - The Counter-OffensiveThey didn't stop running until they reached an old, decaying subway maintenance tunnel beneath the city streets.

It smelled of rust and stagnant water, but it was dry, and more importantly, it was entirely off the grid.

David set Ethan down on an overturned wooden crate. The boy was shaking uncontrollably, his eyes wide with a trauma no child should ever have to process. David stripped off his own jacket and wrapped it around his son.

"I'm sorry," David whispered, his voice cracking. "I am so, so sorry, Ethan."

"Dad," Ethan whimpered. "Are the bad men going to find us in the dark?"

"No," David lied, his heart breaking. "They can't see in the dark. We're safe here."

He turned away, walking a few paces down the tunnel to where Sarah was sitting on the concrete floor, desperately trying to get her laptop to connect to a patchy cell signal. Her face was streaked with dirt and grease.

"We are officially ghosts," David said grimly. "We can't use credit cards. We can't go to the police. We can't go to the hospital. Evelyn has effectively trapped us in a box, and now she's just waiting for us to suffocate."

Sarah looked up at him, her eyes fierce despite the terror of the night. "So what do we do? We can't hide in a sewer forever. And we can't run from an opponent who controls the board."

"Then we flip the board," David said, his jaw tightening into iron.

"What does that mean?"

"Evelyn's power isn't her intelligence, Sarah. It's her money," David explained, his mind working with cold, calculated precision. "Money buys the lawyers. Money buys the hitmen. Money buys the corrupt officials who look the other way. If we take away her money, she's nothing but an angry woman with a fake identity."

"David, her money is hidden in offshore accounts and shell companies. It would take a team of forensic accountants years to track it down."

"I don't need to track it down," David said. "I just need to find the key."

He knelt beside Sarah, the dim light of the laptop illuminating his determined face.

"When I was building the smart-home system for the house, I stumbled onto a hidden partition on Evelyn's personal network. It was heavily encrypted, military-grade stuff. At the time, I thought she was just paranoid about hackers stealing her inheritance. But now I know what it was."

Sarah's eyes widened. "A ledger."

"Exactly," David nodded. "A digital ledger containing the account numbers, the routing codes, and the passwords to every single offshore account she controls. The money she stole from her dead husband in Oregon. The money she used to pay Marcus."

"If we get that ledger," Sarah realized, the excitement bleeding into her voice, "we could anonymously transfer the funds to the DOJ. We could drain her accounts in a matter of seconds. She wouldn't be able to pay Sterling to keep her out of jail. She wouldn't be able to pay these hitmen to hunt us."

"We strip her naked and throw her to the wolves," David said, his eyes burning with a dangerous fire.

"But David, the house is a federal crime scene now. It's taped off, guarded by FBI agents who have orders to shoot you on sight. And even if you get inside, the servers are probably locked down."

"The physical servers were seized by the FBI, yes," David said, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. "But I built that system. I never trusted physical hardware. I installed a mirrored backup drive."

"Where?"

David looked up at the ceiling of the dark tunnel.

"In the one place the FBI wouldn't think to look. The one place Evelyn hated going near."

Sarah followed his gaze. "Where, David?"

"The glass roof of the greenhouse," David said softly, the memory of Ethan crying in the rain flashing behind his eyes. "I hid the drive inside the environmental control unit on the roof. The very place she tried to kill my son."