Chapter 51: All Hands

Selah didn't raise her voice on the phone. She didn't offer explanations, and she didn't allow room for questions. Her voice was a low, freezing sheet of ice that cut clean through the receiver.

"Get to the brownstone," she told Xavier first, her knuckles white around the edge of the phone. "Bring Marcus. Ten minutes. All hands on deck."

She hung up before he could reply, immediately dialing Isaiah. "I need you and Damaris at the house in ten minutes, Cole. Do not make an excuse. Just get here."

For the next ten minutes, the brownstone was suffocatingly quiet. Selah stood at the head of the heavy oak dining room table, her posture perfectly rigid, her jaw set. On the polished wood before her rested the single slip of paper Helena had left behind—the handwritten address of Arthur Pendleton’s shadow office. Her left hand rested flat on the table, the raw, uncut black diamond promise ring catching the gray afternoon light filtering through the curtains, a silent testament to the future they were supposed to be building in absolute lockstep.

The front door clicked open first, the heavy footsteps of Xavier and Marcus echoing in the foyer. They walked into the dining room, both still wearing their overcoats from the northern transit docks. Xavier’s dark eyes instantly locked onto Selah, his protective instincts flaring at the sheer gravity radiating from her.

"Selah," Xavier rumbled, his large frame instantly moving toward her. "What happened? Marcus and I came straight from—"

"Sit down, Xavier," she interrupted softly, her voice carrying an unyielding weight that made both him and Marcus pause.

Marcus glanced at the tense set of Selah's shoulders, his operational mind immediately tracking the anomaly. Without a word, he pulled out a chair and sat, his face a calm, calculating mask. Xavier hesitated for a fraction of a second before settling into the chair to her right, his dark gaze never leaving her face.

A moment later, the front door opened again. Isaiah and Damaris hurried into the room. Damaris was pale, her eyes wide and anxious, her fingers nervously clutching the strap of her bag where the 2018 file was hidden. Isaiah stepped in beside her, his broad shoulders squared, his eyes scanning the room like a soldier expecting an ambush.

"Selah, what's going on?" Isaiah asked, trying to keep his tone light, though his hand remained close to Damaris’s elbow. "You sounded like the sky was falling on the phone."

"Shut the door, Isaiah," Selah said quietly.

Isaiah complied, the heavy timber door clicking shut with a finality that made the air in the room turn completely still. He and Damaris took their seats across from Xavier and Marcus.

Selah looked at the four of them. The core of the empire. The people who had built a fortress out of sheer intelligence, ruthlessness, and an unspoken bond.

Then, she reached out and tapped her finger against the slip of paper on the table.

"Arthur Pendleton is operating out of a private field office downtown," Selah said, her voice terrifyingly level. "He has an unredacted copy of a 2018 campus police file detailing a Class-A cyber-offense. And he gave our Senior Counsel a twenty-four-hour deadline to hand over the master encryption keys to our offshore routing servers, or he walks into our lives with federal marshals."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Damaris let out a sharp, broken gasp, her hands flying to her mouth as fresh tears instantly pooled in her eyes. Isaiah’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle in his cheek violently flared. Across the table, Marcus’s eyes narrowed into a razor-sharp focus, his COO mind immediately cataloging the massive structural risk, while Xavier’s entire demeanor shifted into something deeply dark and lethal.

"Damaris," Selah said, her dark eyes locking onto her friend, her voice softening just a fraction but remaining steady. "Look at me."

Damaris raised her head, her shoulders shaking. "Selah... I’m so sorry. I didn't want him to touch the merger. I didn't want him to ruin what you and Xavier built—"

"I don't care about the merger right now, Damaris," Selah interrupted, her voice tight with a sudden, raw emotion that she had been holding back. "You faced a federal auditor who threatened you with twenty years in a concrete cell, and your first instinct was to hide in a conference alcove and run a shadow play with Isaiah. You shut me out. Both of you."

She looked at Isaiah, who met her gaze with a fierce, defensive stare. "We were trying to protect you, Selah," Isaiah said, his voice dropping to a gravelly rumble. "You and Xavier just got your footing. You're happy. If we brought this to the table, Marcus would have to isolate the legal risk, and Xavier would have gone to war. We were trying to buy time to find Pendleton's blind spot."

"We don't protect each other by lying, Isaiah," Selah shot back, her voice ringing with absolute authority. "We are a family. The moment you hide a threat to save someone else, the foundation fractures. Pendleton wants to tear us down from the inside by making us turn on each other. And you two almost let him do it."

Xavier leaned forward, his massive hands flat on the table, his deep voice shaking the quiet room with a dangerous, quiet fury. "Who gave you the location of his field office, Selah?"

"Helena," Selah stated flatly.

Xavier and Marcus both stiffened.

"Helena came to the brownstone," Selah explained, looking around the table. "She had her personal detail track Pendleton the moment she found out he was sniffing around our perimeter. She knows that if Damaris falls, the international port contracts pull out, and the entire Knight-Monroe name turns to ash. She didn't do it out of kindness. She did it to protect the legacy. She passed the torch, and she expects us to keep it standing."

Marcus slowly reached across the table, picked up the slip of paper, and analyzed the address. His operational mind was already operating at maximum capacity. "If Helena is handing us this intelligence, it means Pendleton is vulnerable. He isn't running a clean, authorized federal audit. If he were, he wouldn't be hiding in a private downtown office bypassing standard FRC protocols. He’s operating on an insulated server."

"Because he's running a personal crusade," Isaiah realized, his dark eyes snapping back into focus as the tactical pieces started to align. "I tracked his digital footprint earlier. He’s completely isolated from the main FRC network."

Damaris wiped her eyes, a faint, familiar spark of her brilliant intellect finally fighting through her terror. "He wants the master keys... if I give him what he wants, his technical team has to run a diagnostic check to verify the encryption data before they close my file."

Selah looked at her, a slow, determined nod turning her lips into a hard line. "Then we give him exactly what he wants. But we don't hand him the keys to our empire."

"A poison pill," Marcus murmured, a cold, calculating smirk finally touching his lips as he looked at Damaris. "Can you build a Trojan Horse into the routing code?"

"I can design a key that looks entirely authentic to his diagnostic scanners," Damaris said, her voice strengthening as she leaned forward, her fingers gripping the edge of the table. "But the moment his team plugs that key into his secure, insulated server to access our data... the code will bypass his firewalls. It won't give him our files. It will pull his."

"We pull his private logs, his unauthorized transaction records, and whatever dirty funding he’s taking under the table to run this shadow audit," Selah concluded, her eyes flashing with a fierce, brilliant command. "We find out who paid him to target us. And once we have that digital trail, Marcus and Damaris use the legal weight of the corporation to bury his 2018 file forever."

Xavier stood up, his towering frame casting a massive, protective shadow over the entire table. He reached down, his large hand settling firmly over Selah’s left hand, his thumb brushing against her black diamond ring. His dark eyes swept over the Core Five, completely unified once more.

"The 24-hour clock is still ticking," Xavier rumbled, his voice thick with a lethal, unyielding promise. "Let’s go to war."