Chapter 7

The data stick in Mara’s pocket felt like a live coal, radiating the heat of its recent encryption. She pushed through the heavy sound-mixing door into Studio B’s service corridor, the muffled shouts from beyond the main broadcast floor sharpening into a chorus of controlled panic. A security latch, a heavy steel bar meant to slide fully, hung half-dropped over a reinforced doorframe, its hydraulic hiss echoing the urgency. Technicians, usually stoic, moved with clipped, frantic energy, their eyes darting to wall-mounted screens flashing a stark red: ZONE B LOCKDOWN INITIATED. 00:03:47.

Mara’s breath hitched. Three minutes, forty-seven seconds. Adrian Sloane hadn’t just revoked her archive access; he was sealing off the very evidence she’d found. The anonymous warning, the one that had pointed her to the second copy hidden in the sound-mixing room’s service panel, had been prescient. She’d retrieved the encrypted stick just moments ago, its data now a tangible weight, a ticking bomb against the family’s carefully constructed narrative.

She scanned the corridor, a blur of cables, equipment racks, and flustered crew. A small, portable diagnostics console, usually ignored, sat abandoned near a power conduit. Mara didn't hesitate. She jammed the data stick into its port, her fingers flying across the interface, overriding the system’s initial resistance. The screen flickered, then burst to life, displaying the black ledger’s familiar coded entries, now cross-referenced with Studio B’s internal payment logs. VALE-EC-007 wasn't just a general ledger entry; it was tied to specific, off-book transactions originating from the studio, routed through shell companies, and then back into the estate’s shadow accounts. The studio wasn’t merely adjacent to the concealment system; it was one of its primary payment channels. More chilling, the entries continued after Lena’s public disappearance, marked with a new, cryptic sub-code: `L-HOLD-