My Husband's Mother Grabbed My Pregnant Body And Threw Me Down Her Staircase In Front Of 40 Guests, Because I Refused To Name My Unborn Daughter After Her Instead Of My Late Grandmother.

Marcus arrived at our house within twenty minutes, accompanied by a rugged-looking cybersecurity specialist named Liam Vance—no relation to Evelyn, thankfully. We sat around the mahogany dining table, the air thick with tension.

"The landline call was routed through a series of encrypted VoIP servers bouncing from Singapore to the Cayman Islands," Liam said, tapping rapidly on his laptop keyboard. "It’s practically untraceable by conventional means. But we managed to isolate a secondary data ping that occurred at the exact same timestamp."

"A data ping?" Adam leaned forward, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of the table. "What kind of data?"

"An access request," Liam replied, turning the screen toward us. On the monitor was a schematic of our home’s smart-security network—the cameras, the automated gates, the smart locks. "Someone didn't just hack the phone line. They pinged our entire home automation system. And they downloaded the localized guest logs from the day of your charity gala six months ago."

My stomach clenched. "The gala? Why would she want guest logs?"

"Because," Marcus said grimly, his face shadowed under the dim chandelier light, "Evelyn didn't act alone that day. We always knew she was arrogant, but she wasn't technically savvy enough to orchestrate a cover-up of the security footage disappearance on her own. Someone inside helped her. And whoever that accomplice is, they're still out there."

"Who?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Who had access to the security room during the party?"

"Only three people," Marcus replied, pulling up a digital file. "The head of household security, a catering manager, and... David Vance."

David—Evelyn’s estranged younger brother, who had supposedly cut ties with the family decades ago and lived quietly on the West Coast. Or so we had been told.

"We need to find David before he finds us," Adam said, standing up and pacing toward the French doors. "If Evelyn is somehow pulling strings from inside prison, or if she has someone operating as her proxy on the outside, our family isn't safe."

As Adam spoke, the smart-home control panel on the wall suddenly beeped. The screen flickered violently, turning from its normal blue interface to a stark, blood-red display.

Across the screen, in bold digital letters, a single message appeared: