로그인**03:00**The countdown glowed like a digital death sentence.Three remaining minutes. Three innocent lives hung in the balance. One impossible, devastating truth.Lorrie stood entirely frozen in the center of the fractured room, the air thick with smoke and pulverized glass. Her mind violently rejected the words that had just left Amelia’s mouth.*"You're the last living heir of the Van Arlen family."*"No..." she whispered, her voice barely audible over the blaring building alarms. "It’s a lie. It’s a tactical trick." She spun around toward the monitor, her tear-filled eyes desperately searching the bruised, battered face of the man who had raised her. "My father... Dad, tell her she's lying. Tell me who I am."Carlos Elmundo slowly looked away from the camera lens. His absolute, crushing silence hurt far more than any verbal weapon Amelia could have wielded."My mother..." Lorrie’s voice broke completely, a sob hitching in her throat. "She loves me. I’m an Elmundo. She’s my mother.
*06:00*The countdown continued its relentless, mechanical descent.Every single second that dissolved from the digital clock echoed through the hollow boardroom like a heavy, suffocating heartbeat. Lorrie felt the air turn to lead in her lungs; she couldn't breathe.The split screens of the massive central monitor presented a devastating, multi-faceted trap. On one grid, her mother, Grace, lay entirely pale and unconscious in a sterile hospital bed, a lethal biochemical cocktail hooked directly to her IV line. On the adjacent feed, her father knelt on the cold floor, the matte-black barrel of a semi-automatic pistol pressed mercilessly against his bruised temple.Amelia Van Arlen stood perfectly poised between the two screens, a silhouette of pure malice. She was smiling. She was waiting."Lorenzo," Amelia’s voice purred through the high-fidelity speakers, her tone almost playful, completely detached from the horror she orchestrated. "You have always possessed a distinct fondness for
*09:14*The countdown glowed a malicious, vibrant crimson on Matteo's tactical tablet, its steady, unfeeling pulse slicing through the atmospheric tension.No one spoke. Every fraction of a second that dissolved into the ether brought the towering structure of Dimitri Holdings closer to becoming a colossal, vertical tomb of twisted metal and pulverized concrete.Lorenzo looked at Elena, her bound form shivering beneath the brilliant fractures of the crystal chandelier. Then his gaze drifted slowly to Lorrie, whose ragged, panicked breathing echoed in the cavernous room. Finally... his steel-grey eyes settled heavily on the unyielding numbers.**09:02**"Matteo.""Boss.""You will personally take the extraction detail and get Elena out of this grid."Matteo immediately shook his head, his posture turning entirely rigid. "No. Absolutely not. I'm taking the sub-level descent. I'll manually disarm the master detonator myself."Lorenzo's voice remained entirely level, an unshakeable column
The executive boardroom erupted into absolute, unadulterated chaos.The massive floor-to-ceiling glass windows violently exploded inward, raining a spectacular shower of lethal crystalline shards across the polished marble floor. The deafening, rhythmic roar of low-altitude tactical helicopters violently shook the very foundations of the skyscraper.One after another, heavily armored, black-clad soldiers rappelled through the shattered structural frames with flawless, terrifying precision.Within a matter of mere seconds... Amelia Van Arlen’s sophisticated mercenary team found themselves completely outmaneuvered, outgunned, and entirely surrounded.Each invading soldier wore the exact same matte-silver wolf emblem emblazoned sharply onto the shoulder plate of their specialized combat uniforms.No names. No ranks. No country flags.Only the mark of the wolf.Amelia’s confident, arrogant smile finally vanished from her lips, her aristocratic features twisting into a mask of pure shock.
The slow, rhythmic applause echoed hollowly through the sprawling expanse of the executive boardroom, bouncing off the polished mahogany walls and the vast sheets of reinforced glass.Lorenzo never once shifted his steel-gray eyes away from the woman standing confidently on the mezzanine balcony.Amelia Van Arlen.So she was real. Not a ghost fading into the digital static of a monitor. Not an urban myth born from the bloody folklore of the old commission wars. She was not merely a terrifying name whispered in cryptic threats and psychological riddles. She was living, breathing flesh and blood.Elegant. Poised. Completely unbothered by the dozen weapon sights currently centered on her silk-clad torso, she smiled down at them as if the grand finale had already played out in her favor.Lorrie instinctively pressed closer to Lorenzo’s side, her breath hitching in her throat. Without a word or a glance, Lorenzo’s large hand subtly reached behind his back, physically shielding her body wit
The call abruptly disconnected, leaving only the hollow hiss of dead air.An oppressive, ringing silence swallowed the interior of the tactical truck. Lorenzo's steel-gray eyes remained unblinking, fixed entirely on Lorrie. The intense focus in his gaze was enough to pin her to the chassis.She looked back at him, her face completely drained of color, her voice a breathless whisper. "I... Lorenzo, I swear to you, I don't know what she meant by that. I don't know what she's trying to do to us."Neither did he. But Lorenzo had survived far too long in the unforgiving trenches of the syndicate underworld to ignore a psychological weapon wrapped in a statement like that.Every single lie...Every orchestrated clue...Every faceless threat...Had been meticulously planned years, perhaps decades, in advance. This wasn't a random taunt; it was a missing piece of a puzzle he hadn't even realized he was solving. He shifted his cold gaze to his underboss."Everything we have on Lorrie’s backgro







