Chapter 7 - THE MISSING PIECE
My breath hitched. My mind raced through the last four weeks.
Lila had come over to my apartment unannounced three weeks ago, claiming she needed to borrow my steamer for her wedding rehearsal dress. She had stayed for an hour, poking through my closet, chatting endlessly about flower arrangements, while I ran down to the corner bodega to grab her a diet soda.
When I got back, my desk drawer was slightly ajar. I hadn't thought anything of it. Who suspects their own sister of robbing them?
"She didn't know what it was," I stammered, feeling sick to my stomach. "It was in a hollowed-out textbook. I hid it five years ago."
"She knew it was worth money," Elias said. "Because Jake’s brother works as an acquisition analyst at Meridian. They put the pieces together. Lila was the inside woman, Jake was the middleman, and you were the unwitting goose laying the golden eggs."
The cruelty of it knocked the wind out of me.
Jake. The soft-spoken, smiling guy who had hugged me at Thanksgiving and thanked me for helping Lila with her "stress." The guy who stood at the altar today, pretending to be an innocent bystander while his new wife roasted me for being a broke barista.
They hadn't just mocked me. They had looted my life and sold it to the people who destroyed my future.
"Why do you care, Elias?" I asked, looking straight into his eyes. "You’re a fintech billionaire. If Meridian has the drive, and Lila took the fall, why drag me into your penthouse? Why protect me?"
Elias set his glass down. He walked across the room until he was standing directly in front of me, so close I could smell the faint scent of sandalwood and rain on his skin.
"Because Andrew Bennett was my older brother," he said.
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
"Your brother?" I choked out. "His name was Bennett. Yours is Voss."
"Bennett was our mother’s maiden name. He took it after our parents divorced," Elias explained softly. "Andrew spent ten years developing a decentralization protocol that would strip predatory conglomerates like Meridian of their ability to manipulate global commodity pricing. When he realized they were going to weaponize it instead of releasing it to the public, he locked it behind a dual-key cipher."
He reached out and tapped the silver flash drive sitting on the table.
"He kept Key A. He gave Key B to his most brilliant student. The only person he trusted."
His eyes bore into mine with an intensity that made my knees weak.
"Lila sold Meridian Key B," Elias continued. "They have the cipher. But they can't decrypt the underlying architecture without the source logic. That logic is inside your head, Maya. And they know it."
Before I could reply, my phone began vibrating violently in my purse.
I pulled it out with trembling fingers. The screen flashed with twelve missed calls and four text messages. All from my mother.
I clicked open the latest text.
*Maya, you call me RIGHT NOW. Jake and Lila are at the police station. The police are looking for YOU. What did you do to your sister?!*
And then, a second text arrived from an unknown number:
May you like
*We know you're with Voss, Miss Vance. You have twenty-four hours to bring us the source engine, or your parents' house burns down with them inside it.*
***
