Chapter 5 - THE LEATHER LEDGER
"Get down!" Lucius roared, grabbing Avery by the waist and tackling her behind her heavy steel audio desk just as a hail of automatic gunfire shredded the apartment walls.
The tear gas burned Avery’s eyes and throat like battery acid. She coughed violently, her vision swimming.
Lucius pulled his handgun, returning precise, lethal fire blindly through the smoke. "Balcony!" he shouted. "They’re breaching!"
Avery’s mind raced. She was a sound engineer. She understood acoustics, frequencies, and space.
"Cover your ears!" Avery screamed, crawling frantically toward her main amplifier rack.
She didn't wait for Lucius to question her. She grabbed a patch cable, jammed it into the main input of her massive, club-grade subwoofers, and violently cranked the gain and feedback dials to maximum. She then grabbed the live microphone and jammed it directly against the speaker cone.
The resulting acoustic feedback loop was catastrophic.
A deafening, high-frequency screech—over 120 decibels of pure sonic agony—erupted into the small room.
The two assassins breaching the window instantly dropped their weapons, falling to their knees and clawing at their bleeding ears in sheer, disorienting pain.
Lucius, who had covered his ears just in time, surged forward like a panther. He dispatched both incapacitated men with two swift, brutal strikes to the neck, kicking their weapons away.
Avery scrambled to kill the power, gasping for air as the silence rushed back in, heavy and ringing.
Lucius grabbed her arm, hauling her toward the door. "We have to move. Now."
They fled down the fire escape, piling into the waiting SUV. The guards hit the gas, tearing away into the rainy night.
Avery leaned against the leather seat, shaking violently. "They tried to kill me."
"You survived," Lucius said, his voice surprisingly gentle. He handed her a bottle of water. "You’re smarter than them. You proved that just now."
"They engineered my whole life," Avery whispered, the violation settling deep in her bones. "My debt. My job. Everything."
"They used my company’s name to do it," Lucius said, his jaw locked in cold fury. "Which means Marcus used the master ledger."
"The what?"
"The shadow ledger," Lucius explained. "It’s a leather-bound book containing the routing numbers, shell companies, and blackmail material that controls the entire syndicate. I entrusted it to Marcus five years ago when I went legitimate for Lily’s sake. If he used it to forge your debt, the proof of his treason is in that book."
They arrived back at the secure compound just before dawn. The estate was locked down tight, armed men sweeping the perimeter with flashlights.
Dante met them at the door. "Lily is asleep. What happened?"
"Marcus sent a hit squad," Lucius said, stripping off his ruined jacket. "We need the ledger, Dante. Where does the old man keep it?"
Dante’s face paled. "He keeps it in the biometric safe at his nursing facility. But Lucius, we can’t just walk in there. He has a private army on that floor."
"I don't need an army," Lucius said. He looked at Avery. "I have a sound engineer."
An hour later, Avery sat at the kitchen island, staring at a schematic of Marcus’s luxury nursing facility on a tablet.
"The safe is voice-activated," Lucius explained, pacing the room. "It only opens to Marcus’s specific vocal print saying a passphrase."
"What’s the phrase?" Avery asked.
"Answer One, Open Two," Lucius said grimly. "It was his favorite lesson."
Avery nodded. "I can synthesize his voice. I have the audio recording of him ordering the hit from the radio intercept. I can map his vocal cadence, pitch, and timbre into my software, and force it to say the passphrase."
"Can you do it from outside the room?" Dante asked.
"If I can tap into the facility’s intercom system," Avery said. "But I have to be in the building’s server room."
Lucius looked at her. He saw a terrified young woman, heavily in debt, thrown into a world of monsters. He walked over, placing his large hands on the marble counter, forcing her to look at him.
"You don't have to do this, Avery," Lucius said softly. "I can wipe your debt. I can put you on a plane to Europe. You can walk away right now."
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Avery looked into his dark eyes. She remembered the feeling of helplessness when she saw the forged contract. She remembered the sweet little girl with the metronome.
She shook her head. "I don't run. Let’s go steal a ledger."
