The Billionaire's Heir Kicked a Beggar in the Street—Until He Saw Her Necklace.

The flashlight beam clicked off, plunging us back into the dim, pulsing glow of the distant lighthouse beacon. Stepping out from the shadows of the stone archway was a figure I never, in a million years, expected to see holding a suppressed pistol.

Harrison Vance.

My jaw dropped. "Harrison? But... federal marshals arrested you! You were supposed to be cooperating with the grand jury!"

Harrison smiled, a calm, chilling expression that lacked any hint of corporate nervousness. He adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses, the suppressor of his pistol pointed steadily at my chest.

"Federal marshals answer to judges, Ethan. And judges answer to the people who fund their campaigns and finance their retirement funds," Harrison said smoothly. "Did you really think a twenty-year criminal enterprise built by Victor Hale rested entirely on one man? Victor was the front man—the charismatic face for the media and the board. But I was the legal architect who structured the syndicate."

Adrian stared at him in sheer disbelief, his voice shaking. "Harrison... you were our family lawyer! You handled our trusts!"

"I handled your father's dirty laundry, Adrian, and made myself very, very wealthy in the process," Harrison corrected him coldly. "When Ethan started dismantling Hale Meridian from the inside, I knew Victor was a liability. I let federal agents haul him away because it gave me complete, unobstructed control of the remaining subsidiary assets."

Harrison stepped closer, his eyes fixed on the breast pocket of my coat where the microcassette rested.

"Now, hand over the Sterling microcassette, Ethan. Don't be a hero. Physics is terribly unforgiving when you fall off a five-hundred-foot cliff into the Atlantic."

My mind raced frantically. I couldn't overpower him with a suppressed pistol trained directly at my vital organs, and Adrian was in no condition to help. I needed a distraction, a psychological opening, anything to break his focus.

"You think the microcassette is the only copy, Harrison?" I stalled, keeping my voice steady. "Before I drove out here, I uploaded the digital decryption keys and audio files to an automated server programmed to broadcast to every major news network if my heartbeat monitor drops below sixty BPM."

Harrison’s expression tightened for a fraction of a second. He hesitated, his finger twitching on the trigger guard.

That single hesitation was all I needed.

Instead of reaching for the tape, I grabbed Adrian by the collar and hurled both of us sideways behind a massive granite buttress just as Harrison pulled the trigger.

The bullet punched a smoking crater into the stone wall right where my head had been a millisecond before.