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.

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