The sound of the click was deafening. It was a sharp, mechanical snap that should have been followed by the roar of the East River rising to meet the sky.
But there was no explosion.
The warehouse remained in its heavy, damp silence. Mikhail's face contorted, his hand slamming into the pressure plate again and again. "What? Why isn't it—?"
"Because a 'businessman' should know better than to trust a foreign device on his network," I said, my voice dropping the facade. I stood up straight, the trembling in my hands vanishing instantly. "That 'decryption protocol' wasn't a gift, Mikhail. It was a Trojan. The second you opened that link, it didn't just give you data—it seized your local network and sent a localized kill-command to every receiver within fifty yards."
I looked at Yuri. The look of betrayal in his eyes was being replaced by a staggering, lethal realization. He saw the tablet in my hand wasn't a ledger; it was a detonator of a different kind.
"I didn't lie about the backup, Mikhail," I said, stepping back toward Yuri. "I just didn't tell you where I sent it. You wanted to be a King? You're currently being live-streamed to the FBI, the Interpol task force, and every news outlet from here to Moscow. They're watching you sit at a table with a bomb, confessing to the murder of Yuri's sister."
Mikhail lunged across the table, his face a mask of primal fury, but he was too slow.
Yuri didn't use his gun. He met Mikhail mid-air, a decade of repressed grief and rage fueling a strike that sent Mikhail spiraling back into the folding chair. The table flipped, the laptop clattering into the oily puddles on the floor.
"She wasn't crying for me, Mikhail," Yuri rasped, pinning his brother to the concrete with a knee to the chest. He held a small, jagged piece of the silver hairbrush against Mikhail's throat—the same charred metal Mikhail had used to taunt us. "She was crying because she knew what you were. And now, the whole world knows too."
Outside, the first rhythmic thrum of police choppers began to vibrate the corrugated metal roof. Blue and red lights began to dance against the warehouse windows.
"Jessy," Yuri called out, not looking away from his brother's terrified eyes. "The tablet. Did you really send it all?"
"Everything," I said, walking to his side. I looked down at the man who had tried to restart the nightmare. "The UNI, the Volkovs, the names... the 'Fractured Grace' is finally public. There are no more secrets to kill for."
Yuri stood up, leaving Mikhail for the tactical teams already breaching the perimeter. He looked at me, his face streaked with sweat and the weight of a ghost finally laid to rest.
"You played me," he whispered, a faint, lopsided smile touching his lips for the first time. "You made me believe you'd turned."
"I told you," I said, reaching out to take his hand, my fingers interlocking with his. "We do this together. Even if I have to break your heart for a minute to save your life."