Chapter 5 - The Velvet Trap
The crisp wind sweeping off Lake Michigan whipped my hair across my face, but I barely felt it. Damon’s hand lingered near my jawline for a fraction of a second too long, his thumb brushing lightly against my cheekbone before he slowly dropped his arm. The space between us suddenly felt charged, heavy with unsaid words and an undeniable, electric tension that had been building since the moment I opened the wrong door in his mansion.
"We should go back inside," I murmured, though neither of us moved an inch. "If Marcus notices we've vanished from the gala, he might suspect something is wrong with his penthouse security."
"Let him look," Damon replied, a faint, dangerous smirk playing on his lips. "By the time he realizes the drive is missing, my legal team will already have transmitted the complete forensic package to the U.S. Attorney’s office."
As if on cue, a sharp, muffled chime sounded through the tiny earpiece tucked into Damon's ear. He pressed a finger against his temple, listening intently for a moment as Julian Vance’s voice crackled through the secure frequency.
"Boss, we've got a complication," Julian’s voice said, tight with urgency.
Damon’s expression hardened instantly, the warmth vanishing from his features to be replaced by the cold, calculating mask of a syndicate boss. "Report."
"Marcus didn't leave all his eggs in one basket," Julian said quickly. "The master encryption drive we pulled from the safe is encrypted with a secondary biometric dead-man’s switch. If it isn't unlocked using Marcus’s physical fingerprint within the next hour, or if an incorrect override is entered three times, the core data files auto-destruct and wipe the entire cloud backup."
I stepped closer, my auditing instincts snapping back into sharp focus. "A dead-man switch? If the system detects a breach, it burns the evidence before we can legally authenticate it?"
"Exactly," Damon said, his dark eyes locking onto mine. "Which means walking into federal prosecutors with a wiped drive leaves us with plenty of suspicion, but zero admissible proof. Victor and Marcus walk free, and my enterprise gets crushed by regulatory freezes."
"Then we need his fingerprint," I said instantly.
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Damon raised an eyebrow, looking down at me with a mixture of surprise and profound respect. "And how do you propose we get a live biometric sample from a man currently surrounded by three hundred of Chicago’s elite socialites inside the Lyric Opera House?"
"We don't need his physical finger," I said, a daring, reckless plan forming in my mind. "We need his cocktail glass."
