My Mother Sold Me To A Crime Syndicate For 2.5 Million — She Had No Idea Who She Handed Me Over To
Part 2
The grand clock in the estate’s foyer chimed four in the morning, its heavy tolls echoing through the cavernous halls.
The only light in the makeshift war room came from the stark blue glow reflecting off my pale face.
The promised gallon of black coffee was already half empty, the ceramic mug sitting beside a keyboard that hadn’t stopped clattering for three hours.
I was exhausted, but my mind operated with a razor-sharp, frantic clarity.
Brenda had always been chaotic, but she possessed an addict’s cunning.
She hadn’t just dragged files into a hidden folder on her drive.
She partitioned a hidden sector using a steganography tool, burying the data inside high-resolution photographs of her trips to the Bellagio.
I muttered to myself, staring at a wall of hexadecimal code, realizing she was using her favorite roulette numbers as the cipher keys.
The heavy oak door creaked open behind me, sending a chill down my spine.
Tyler walked in, shedding his tailored suit jacket to reveal a crisp white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
Faded ink wrapped around his wrists, a stark reminder of the brutal world he inhabited beneath his corporate veneer.
He set a plate of warm sandwiches next to my keyboard, his voice a low gravelly hum as he noted I hadn’t stopped to breathe.
I kept my eyes glued to the screen, reminding him that breathing took time we simply didn’t have.
The cold, calculating mafia boss from the steakhouse was entirely gone, replaced by a man strung tight with worry for his nineteen-year-old sister.
I inputted the final string of decrypted roulette numbers based on Brenda’s worst losing streak from three years ago.
A progress bar flashed across the screen, finally unzipping the hidden directory.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I clicked through the folders until I found a simple text document labeled with GPS coordinates.
I reached for the desk phone to call Tyler over, but my hand froze mid-air.
Below the text document were three audio files, timestamped exactly three weeks before Megan was kidnapped.
I plugged in a pair of studio headphones resting on the desk and clicked the first file, bracing myself.
A wall of static hissed through the speakers, followed by the undeniable sound of Brenda’s desperate, breathless whining.
She begged a man named Craig Romano for fifty thousand dollars in credit, promising her luck was turning.
Craig’s voice was slick with malice, demanding the four hundred grand she already owed his syndicate.
He mentioned she had been sleeping with a mid-level manager at Rossi’s Casino, bragging about knowing the security overrides for the Rossi private estate.
The blood instantly drained from my face, my stomach plummeting into an icy abyss.
Brenda stammered on the recording, offering to trade the gate codes and guard rotations for the Lake Forest compound in exchange for chips.
I ripped the headphones off, gasping for air as if I had been plunged into freezing water.
My mother hadn’t just stolen a ledger for blackmail.
Brenda was the direct reason a nineteen-year-old girl had been dragged from her home in the dead of night.
Realizing the danger she was in, she then stole the ledger from Tyler’s casino as a desperate bargaining chip to save her own skin from both sides.
A wave of nausea washed over me as I gripped the edge of the desk, fighting the urge to vomit.
I was the daughter of a monster.
Tyler stepped back into the room, an encrypted cell phone in his hand, demanding to know if I had the location.
Tears spilled over my lashes, tracing hot, jagged paths down my cheeks as I turned the swivel chair to face him.
I handed him the headphones, knowing my own mother’s recorded betrayal might cost me my life, but what would you do if the only way to survive was to trust a mob boss over your own flesh and blood?
