Unexpected problem

“Amelia Vance Joanne! What the hell have you done?”

Her mother was shouting so loudly that Amelia had to hold the phone slightly away from her ear. The calm voice Catherine usually used was gone.

Amelia didn't flinch. She leaned against the kitchen counter and looked toward the dining room.

“Good evening, Mother.”

“Don't you dare play polite with me,” Catherine Vance snapped. “The commercial lending board for the Midtown development project just called your father. They’ve frozen further funding for Phase Two."

She continued, not waiting for a response. "The entire credit facility is under an internal compliance review because of a series of cross-shareholding anomalies flagged from your accounts. What did you pull out?”

“My entire equity stake,” Amelia said calmly. “And I filed a formal non-participation notice regarding the collateral baseline. Without my shares guaranteeing the leverage ratio, the bank is legally required to halt the drawdowns.”

“Are you insane?” Catherine shouted. “You’ve paralyzed your father’s primary project! Why would you attack your own family’s business? He spent three years structuring that development!”

“Marcus interfered with my Apex acquisition first,” Amelia replied. “He went behind my back to block a private purchase that had nothing to do with Vance Holdings. He should have known there'll be consequences.”

“Your father was protecting the family!” Catherine shouted. “He was keeping you from throwing millions of dollars into a failing logistics dump because you’re having some kind of public tantrum!”

“Nobody asked whether I wanted his protection.” Amelia glanced toward the dining room. “And nobody gave him permission to touch my assets.”

“Marcus will not forgive you for this, Amelia,” her mother warned. “You are cutting your own throat. If you don't reverse that compliance notice by tomorrow morning, your father will strip your board access entirely. You will be left with nothing.”

“He can try,” Amelia said.

“Don't underestimate him,” Catherine continued. “You know how Marcus is when someone embarrasses him.”

“I know exactly how he is.”

Before her mother could continue, Amelia ended the call. She placed her phone face-down on the kitchen counter, then walked back into the dining room.

Ian was still standing where he had been when the phone rang. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he was looking at her.

“What did you do?”

“I made a business decision,” Amelia said.

“You pulled the compliance baseline on the Midtown project,” Ian said.

He was a corporate attorney; he didn't need the details explained to understand what she had done.

“That doesn't just stall the project, Amelia. It publicly embarrasses Marcus. It signals to the street that there’s a fracture inside the family foundation.”

“There is a fracture,” she said, looking up at him.

Ian stepped closer, studying her face. “You’ve spent your entire life trying to avoid your father’s temper. Now you're actively baiting him. Why?”

“Because the rules changed, Ian,” Amelia said. “He thinks he can control my movements and dictate what I buy. I’m showing him that he can’t.”

Ian stared at her. He still looked confused, but there was something else in his expression now. He wasn't used to seeing her stand up to her father, let alone push back this hard.

She wasn't panicking or asking anyone what she should do.

She had made her decision, and she was going through with it.

...................

The next morning, Amelia drove through the gates of the Fourth Street warehouse at 7:30 AM. A commercial security van was already parked inside the courtyard, and two technicians were mounting high-resolution, weatherproof cameras to the rusted steel corners of the roofline.

She walked into the main bay. The warehouse was still cold, but the smell of stagnant moisture was fading. The electronic team had already replaced the main distribution board, and she could hear the faint hum of electricity coming from the building.

One of the senior security technicians, a man in a gray uniform named Mark, stepped down from a ladder near the entrance. He held a tablet under his arm.

“Mrs. Vance,” Mark said, nodding to her. “We’re finishing up the internal sensors now. The digital deadbolts on the perimeter are live.”

“Good,” Amelia said, checking the placement of an overhead camera. “Did your team finish checking the exterior wiring?”

“We did.” Mark tapped the screen of his tablet. “And we actually found something while we were aligning the optical sensors on the adjacent building." He said. "There’s an old municipal traffic-monitoring camera on the city light pole right outside your main gate. It’s mostly decommissioned, but the storage loop was still active when the break-in happened yesterday morning.”

Amelia's hand went to her pocket, where the half-smoked cigarette was still wrapped up.

“Did it catch the perimeter?”

“It caught the gate right around 5:00 AM yesterday,” Mark said. “The resolution isn't great because of the morning fog and the old lens, but it shows someone cutting the padlock and leaving the property about ten minutes later.”

Amelia stepped closer. “Did he come alone?”

Mark shook his head. “I can't tell from this angle. There was another vehicle parked just outside the camera's range, but we don't have a clear view of it.”

“Do you have his face?”

“We managed to pull a few frames from the digital buffer,” the technician explained. “But like I said, it’s heavily pixelated. The fog distorted the image. I was going to send it to our lab to run an enhancement pass—”

“No,” Amelia interrupted. “Don't send it to your lab. Don't send it to anyone else before I see it. Send the file directly to my personal number right now.”

Mark nodded. “Yes, ma'am. Sending it over now.”

Amelia nodded and walked away from the technicians. She stopped near the back of the warehouse bays.

Her phone buzzed in her hand and a media file had appeared in her messages.

She opened it. The image was dark and grainy, taken from a high angle. The morning fog covered most of the background. In the middle of the frame, a tall figure in a military-style utility jacket was stepping through the gap in her rusted perimeter gate.

At first, his face was difficult to make out. The movement and the baseball cap covering his head made it even harder to see his features.

Amelia zoomed in. The image became slightly clearer.

She stared at the screen. She knew that jawline. She knew those shoulders.

It wasn't a spy hired by her brother. It wasn't a street thug looking for scrap metal either.

It was Major General Vincent Reed—the high-ranking military commander who, in her past life, had spearheaded the brutal federal martial law protocol two months after the fall.

A man who wasn't even supposed to be stationed in this sector of the country for another four months.

Amelia’s fingers tightened around her phone. The military was already here.

And if Major General Vincent Reed was already moving this early, Amelia had a much bigger problem than she thought.