My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 40

I forced my hand to go flat on the table. I wouldn't run the check. I wouldn't use the satellites or the bank records. I would respect the line my brother had drawn in the sand.

"The meeting is over," I said, standing up.

I stood up and left the meeting room without saying a word to the men behind me. I walked down the long hallway until I reached a door that looked like a solid slab of silver. There were no buttons and no keyholes.

I pressed my thumb against a small glass square on the wall. A thin line of green light scanned my skin, reading the tiny loops and lines of my fingerprint. With a soft hiss, the doors slid open. This was my private elevator. It didn't go to the lobby. It didn't go to the parking garage.

I stepped inside and the doors closed. I didn't press a floor number.

The floor dropped. We zoomed past the lobby, past the basement, and deep into the dark earth beneath the city of Chicago. When the doors opened again, the air was different.

I walked into the hub.

This was the heart of the Chicago Outfit. Above us, people thought Orion Vector was just a tech company. Down here, we ran the city. The room was huge, filled with rows of black servers that blinked with thousands of tiny, blue lights.

Men in dark hoodies sat at long tables, their faces lit up by the glow of multiple monitors.

On one screen, I saw millions of dollars moving in small, silent jumps from a bank in London to a hidden account in the islands.

Another screen showed a live feed of a police station’s evidence room, a cursor moved across the screen, deleting a digital file as if it had never existed.

To my left, a programmer was rewriting the code for a city’s traffic lights, creating a "green wave" so a shipment of illegal goods could cross town without ever hitting a red light.

We were making sure the family never got caught. We were the ones who wiped the security cameras before the cops could arrive. We were the ones who crashed the servers of anyone who tried to talk to the FBI.

I walked to the center of the room, looking at the main wall. It showed a map of Chicago, but it wasn't for traffic. It showed the location of every burner phone, every tracked car, and every person who owed the Capones money.

I walked toward the back of the hub, through a door made of thick, reinforced steel. This was my private office, the dark heart of the basement. Inside, there was only a single, massive desk and a wall made of high-definition screens.

I sat down and tapped the glass surface of the desk. The blue lights of the hub faded, replaced by a bird’s-eye view of a massive forest.

The Void.

I moved my fingers across the desk, and the map zoomed in. I could see every ravine, every hidden trail, and every swampy patch of ground.

I leaned forward, my face inches from the screen. The forest of the Void looked back at me, but tonight, the green and brown map felt too simple. I tapped a command on the desk, and the layout changed. The map turned a deep, bruised purple and blood-red.

This Hunt was going to be different.

I moved my hand, dragging new icons across the private land. I wasn't looking for cliffs or ravines this time. I was looking for spots where the trees grew so thick the moonlight couldn't touch the ground. I marked a large clearing and added a layer to the map, a series of hidden speakers and low, red lights that would be buried under the leaves.