My Milf Conqueror System novel Chapter 183

Chapter 183: The war room

[Jake’s POV]

The forty-second floor of Apex Tower was transformed into a fortress within a fortress.

Darius had locked down the elevators, stationed armed guards at the stairwells, and reinforced the floor-to-ceiling windows with ballistic shielding. The sterile medical suite where I was confined became the nerve center of our global shadow war.

I was sitting up in the hospital bed, propped against a mountain of pillows. My right side was heavily bandaged, the stitches pulling painfully every time I shifted my weight. The painkillers dulled the agony to a manageable throb, but the sheer physical exhaustion of operating without the System’s regenerative protocols was a heavy, suffocating weight. I felt every bruise, every cut, every aching muscle.

Nia sat at a massive mahogany conference table that had been dragged into the center of the room. She was surrounded by four high-resolution monitors, her fingers flying across her mechanical keyboard with terrifying speed. The glow of the screens illuminated her face, highlighting the intense, unbroken focus in her eyes.

Sofia, Claire, and Elena stood around the table, their eyes fixed on the scrolling data.

"Isabella is bleeding cash," Nia reported, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "Elena was right. She’s liquidating assets across Europe. But she’s not moving the money through traditional banking channels. She’s using decentralized crypto exchanges and dark-web escrow accounts to mask the transfers."

"Can you track the endpoints?" I asked, my voice raspy.

"I already did," Nia said, a fierce, proud smile touching her lips. "She’s funneling the money to three major private military corporations. One based in London, one in Johannesburg, and one operating out of a shell company in Virginia."

"The Virginia PMC," Sofia said, her eyes narrowing. "That’s domestic. That means they are already on American soil."

"Exactly," Nia confirmed, tapping a key to bring up a satellite map of the East Coast. "They call themselves Blackwood Solutions. They specialize in high-threat asset retrieval and wet-work. Isabella just wired them fifty million dollars in untraceable Bitcoin."

"Fifty million dollars buys a lot of bullets," Darius rumbled from his position by the door, his arms crossed over his massive chest. He looked like a statue carved from obsidian, utterly unbothered by the escalating threat.

"It buys a small army," I corrected, looking at the map. "Isabella knows she can’t hit Apex Tower directly. Not yet. The security is too tight, and a full-scale assault on a Manhattan skyscraper would draw the National Guard. She’s going to hit a softer target first. She wants to draw us out."

"What target?" Claire asked, her brow furrowed in concern.

I closed my eyes, forcing my brain to work through the pain and the exhaustion. Without Oracle to map the probabilities, I had to rely entirely on my own strategic intuition. I had to think like Isabella Vane.

She was angry. She was humiliated. She wanted to send a message. Isabella Vane had spent her entire life operating from the shadows, pulling the strings of prime ministers and billionaires without ever getting her own hands dirty. But I had forced her into the light. I had burned her physical ledgers and crippled her blackmail network. Now, she was lashing out with the blunt, brutal force of a wounded predator. She needed a victory to prove to her remaining allies that she was still in control. She needed to show the European underworld that the Vane Consortium could still project lethal power across the Atlantic.

"Charles Bancroft," I said, opening my eyes.

Sofia looked at me, a spark of realization flashing in her cold, beautiful eyes. "Her puppet."

"Exactly," I said, wincing as I shifted my weight. "Charles is currently in federal custody, singing like a canary to the SEC and the DOJ about the Ash Ledger. He knows too much about Isabella’s North American operations. If he testifies, he could expose the digital fragments she’s trying to protect."

"She’s going to silence him," Elena realized, her dark eyes widening. "She hired Blackwood Solutions to hit the federal convoy."

"Nia," I barked, ignoring the sharp pull of my stitches. "Where is Charles Bancroft right now?"

Nia’s fingers flew across the keyboard, hacking into the federal transit database with terrifying ease. "He’s currently being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. But... wait. The DOJ just filed a transfer order. They are moving him to a secure black-site facility in upstate New York for extended interrogation."

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