Too Late to Hold Me Back novel Chapter 446

Once that was handled, Mira cracked her knuckles and attempted to breach Roxanne's phone. After several agonizing minutes, she hit a reinforced firewall. Roxanne had clearly learned her lesson from the last hack and hired a top-tier cybersecurity firm to lock down her devices.

Mira ran a few decryption protocols, but nothing gave. Frustrated, she dialed Dominic West.

"What do you want at this hour?" Dominic answered, his voice groggy.

"Dom, you gotta help me. How do I crack this encryption?" She quickly forwarded the data packets.

Dominic glanced at his screen and sighed. "You win a national championship at noon, and by midnight you're committing cybercrimes?"

"I'm not committing crimes! I'm helping the police catch the bad guys."

"You're trying to crack military-grade encryption and you're calling it community service?" Dominic scoffed affectionately. "Start from the five-o'clock vector."

Mira rapidly typed in the command. "Dom, I'm still locked out."

"It's a dual-layer lock," he instructed. "Hit five and six simultaneously."

"I'm in."

Mira scoured the phone, hoping to find direct evidence of the drug transaction. Mara had only acquired the poison yesterday; there was a chance Roxanne hadn't purged her chat logs yet.

Unfortunately, Roxanne was paranoid. The logs were scrubbed clean. But as Mira dug deeper into the hidden files, a specific contact caught her eye: Jodon.

The IP address traced back to the Javenaire Federation, and the communication frequency was intense. Digging into Jodon's server, Mira found a massive web of transactions heavily coded with single-letter ciphers.

Mira was certain this was Roxanne's supplier, running an international drug syndicate. She scraped the IP addresses and securely logged the data. She'd come back for them later. Criminals always left digital footprints eventually.

Before logging off, she called Lenny Forbes. "Keep a 24-hour watch on Roxanne. If she sneezes in the wrong direction, I want to know."

"Don't play games with me," Ethan roared. "Do I need to remind you what you tried to feed me?"

Smack! He yanked her up and slapped her again.

"Still want to play dumb?!"

The sheer violence of his reaction confirmed her worst nightmare. The secret was out. But a dark defiance sparked in Mara's chest. So what if he knew? This wasn't her first crime. As long as her parents were here to protect her, Ethan couldn't actually send her to prison.

"Ethan! What the hell are you doing?!" Lacey shrieked, sprinting down the hallway at the sound of the commotion.

Mara's eyes lit up with desperate relief. She threw herself into Lacey's arms, bursting into violent, theatrical sobs.

"Mom! Just let me leave! Let me die! It's all my fault! Mira left us, Julian and Damon left, and now Ethan hates me! It's all because of me... I deserve to die!"