Chapter 5 - The Digital Fingerprint
Dominic didn't wait for Bellamy to crack under pressure. With a swift, practiced motion, he shoved the attorney away, sending him crashing into the display of white roses. Petals fluttered down like snow over the sprawling legal documents.
"Don't touch anything," Dominic ordered, pulling his own secure, encrypted terminal from his jacket. He pointed it directly at the phone in Emily’s hands. "Little one, hand me the device. Carefully."
Emily looked down at Vincent, who gave her a single, solemn nod—not the nod of a feared mob boss, but the nod of a man pleading for a glimpse of hope. Slowly, Emily extended her small hands and transferred the cracked phone to Dominic.
Dominic plugged a high-speed data interface cable into the base of the old device, tapping furiously on his terminal screen. "Routing the hardware ID through the estate’s private server," he muttered, his eyes darting across lines of scrolling code. "Tracing the last ping location, IMEI number, and local cell tower handshakes."
Charles Bellamy scrambled to his feet, trying to smooth his ruined suit, his eyes darting toward the heavy double doors of the ballroom. "This is unauthorized data seizure! I am invoking legal privilege—"
"You're invoking your grave," Dominic interrupted without looking up. A dark grin crossed his face as a set of decrypted files popped up on his screen. "Got it. Vincent, look at this."
Vincent leaned over the terminal.
The screen displayed an internal network map of the Moretti estate—specifically, the high-security subterranean archive located beneath the west wing, an area designated only for legacy documents and deep-storage vaults. More importantly, it displayed a continuous GPS ping history originating from that exact underground bunker.
A ping that had been active for thirty-six months.
Vincent’s blood ran cold. For three years, while he mourned his wife, while he cursed her memory, while he signed papers in this very room, Sofia had been breathing beneath his feet.
"Bellamy," Vincent’s voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the frozen fury of an avalanche. "Who holds the biometric key to Sub-Level 4?"
Bellamy’s knees buckled. He hit the marble floor, his hands trembling as he realized there was no escape hatch left. "I... I was told it was for asset protection... I was told she wanted to disappear..."
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"Who told you?" Vincent roared, finally losing his composure as he lunged forward, grabbing Bellamy by the collar and hoisting him completely off the floor.
"Isabella!" Bellamy screamed, pointing a shaking finger at the woman in the ivory dress. "It was Isabella! She set up the trust, she forged the abandonment notes, and she locked her away down there!"
