Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 59: Chapter 59
You are reading Beneath the Billionaire Mask, Chapter 59: Chapter 59. Read more chapters of Beneath the Billionaire Mask.
Montreal – Abandoned Textile District – 8:42 AM
The city above was waking to a cold drizzle, but beneath its streets, something colder stirred something buried in silence and secrecy.
Elena stood before a rusted freight elevator, flanked by cracked brick walls and the scent of damp concrete. The address Julia had sent her led here—a derelict textile factory shuttered for over a decade. There were no lights. No signage. Just decay.
But beneath it was a man she thought had died six years ago.
Ezra Vale.
Her godfather. Her father’s closest confidant. A ghost with blood on his hands.
Adrian shifted beside her. “Still want me to go in with you?”
She shook her head, jaw tight. “He won’t talk if you’re there.”
He didn’t argue. Instead, he handed her a compact device—tracker and comms combined. “Tap twice if anything feels off.”
“Everything already feels off,” she murmured.
The elevator groaned as she stepped inside. With a sharp tug of the lever, it descended, the shaft swallowing her in dim light and echoing steel.
Sublevel Three – 8:46 AM
The doors opened into silence.
A long corridor stretched ahead—white-tiled, clinically lit. Not dust-covered like she expected, but maintained. Deliberately hidden, not forgotten.
She stepped cautiously forward, boots soft on the tile.
At the end of the hall stood a steel door with a biometric panel. Before she could react, it hissed open.
And there he was.
Ezra Vale.
Older. Leaner. Wearing a grey sweater and sharp eyes that hadn’t softened in six years. He stood beside a desk, arms folded, like he’d been expecting her for days.
“Elena,” he said quietly.
Her stomach twisted. That voice—it shouldn’t still sound familiar.
“You faked your death,” she snapped. “You let us all grieve. Why?”
Ezra didn’t flinch. “Because grieving is cleaner than betrayal. And I betrayed more than one person.”
“You betrayed my father.”
“I protected his greatest secret.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Me.”
Ezra exhaled and moved to a console on the desk. “You always were the sharp one.”
“Don’t flatter me. You built Project Helix. You helped turn me into an experiment.”
“Not turn,” he said calmly. “Preserve. You were in Helix before you even had a name.”
She froze.
“What does that mean?”
Ezra looked at her with something like regret. “Your father didn’t just fight the system. He infiltrated it. He made a deal to get close to the people funding Helix. In exchange, he gave them something valuable—someone they could ‘observe’ over time.”
Her throat tightened.
“Me.”
“You weren’t just observed. You adapted. You resisted.”
Ezra brought up a file on the console—her name, her age, brain scans, neural response data logged over the years. All of it coded under Case 17B.
Elena’s knees almost gave.
“You were part of this. And you let me think you were dead.”
“I had to disappear,” Ezra said. “Because I learned something that changed everything. Helix wasn’t the endpoint.”
He tapped the screen. Another file opened.
PROJECT: APEX
A simple phrase blinked at the top of the report:
“Control the memory, control the identity.”
Elena stepped back. “What is this?”
Ezra looked at her, gaze heavy. “APEX is the next phase. Not conditioning. Not rewriting. Replacing. An entire generation of minds—restructured from the inside out.”
“Why show me now?”
“Because the program activates in 72 hours. And you’re the only person who can stop it.”
Above Ground – Textile District – 8:59 AM
Adrian stared at the elevator door, jaw locked.
Inside, she was walking into her past. Into a history he’d never been allowed to fully understand.
Behind him, Liana’s voice crackled through comms.
“Heads up. Satellite intercept shows activity at the Geneva Vault. Someone’s trying to access the fail-safe server. Could be a sweep.”
Adrian swore. “They know we’re close.”
“Too close,” Liana replied. “If they shut that server down before Elena finds what she needs—”
“Then we lose our only bargaining chip.”
Sublevel Three – Ezra’s Lab – 9:03 AM
Ezra slid a data chip across the table toward Elena.
“This contains the trigger codes. If uploaded to the Geneva server, it can stall APEX. Maybe long enough to expose it.”
Elena didn’t touch it.
“Why should I trust you?”
Ezra held her gaze. “Because I never stopped protecting you. And because there’s someone else who’ll activate APEX if we don’t move first.”
“Who?”
Ezra hesitated.
Then he said a name that made her stomach drop:
“Julia King.”
Sublevel Three – Ezra’s Lab – 9:05 AM
The air between them froze.
“Julia?” Elena repeated, disbelief cracking in her voice. “You’re saying she’s behind APEX?”
Ezra’s gaze didn’t falter. “I’m saying she’s not who she says she is.”
He turned the monitor toward her again. Lines of encrypted communication flickered onscreen—surveillance logs, digital handshakes, backdoor keys. One in particular bore her name as sender. But she had never sent it.
“What is this?”
“An impersonation protocol,” Ezra explained. “Someone has been routing off-grid transmissions using your identity. Julia covered the tracks. I traced the signal to a satellite node she has exclusive access to.”
Elena’s pulse throbbed in her ears. “She’s been helping me… feeding me files.”
“She’s been feeding you what she wanted you to see. Just enough to guide your choices but not enough to derail the bigger plan.”
“No. That doesn’t make sense. She helped me expose Helix she risked herself for that.”
Ezra folded his arms. “Exactly. She helped take down Helix… so APEX could rise in its place.”
A long silence settled.
Elena stared at the data chip still lying on the table. Just a sliver of plastic and wire, but it might hold the power to stall a global psychological reset. Or worse trigger it early.
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” she whispered.
“Then trust the one thing you’ve never faked,” Ezra said. “Your instincts.”
She looked up. Her eyes burned, but her spine stayed straight.
“If Julia’s lying… I need proof. If we’re wrong about her, we lose an ally. But if we’re right—”
“You won’t just lose an ally,” Ezra cut in grimly. “You’ll have to bring down the only person keeping your father’s last protection protocol online.”
Montreal – Safehouse Perimeter – 9:14 AM
Adrian paced near the black sedan as Liana tapped through incoming feeds on her tablet.
“You think she’s safe down there?” Liana asked without looking up.
“She’s not,” Adrian said. “But she’s in control.”
“You always think she is.”
“Because she always is.”
Liana glanced up. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
Adrian stilled.
The question wasn’t a trap it was a lifeline she threw him, to force the admission he kept shoving down.
“Love makes people reckless,” he said eventually.
“So does denying it.”
Sublevel Three – Exit Hallway – 9:17 AM
Elena moved down the corridor with the chip clutched in her palm, Ezra’s final warning echoing behind her.
“If you’re going to Geneva, go dark. No comms. No uploads. Assume Julia’s watching every node.”
“And if she is?”
“Then she’ll know exactly what you’re coming to find.”
The elevator came into view.
But just before she reached it, a screen embedded in the wall flickered to life.
A grainy feed of Julia King appeared—mid-conference, speaking to someone off camera, unaware she was being recorded.
“She doesn’t suspect a thing,” Julia was saying. “Let her follow the trail. Once she plugs in the chip, the access key will activate. APEX will begin.”
The video looped.
Once. Twice.
Elena’s stomach dropped.
She had been the trigger all along.
Montreal – Rooftop Extraction Point – 9:32 AM
The elevator doors slammed open.
Elena emerged into the morning drizzle, face pale, jaw clenched, chip still burning in her palm like a loaded gun. Adrian was already there, waiting beside the chopper.
One look at her face, and his whole posture changed. “What happened down there?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Instead, she climbed into the chopper and strapped in, the storm swirling in her head too loud for words. Liana met Adrian’s eyes silently, then followed Elena inside.
Only once they were in the air did she finally speak.
“Julia knew. She knew everything.”
Liana’s brows pinched. “About Helix?”
“About me. About the chip. About Project APEX. She’s been playing all sides.”
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “And Ezra?”
“He gave me the chip. But he also gave me something worse.”
She held up the small data drive.
“He gave me the truth.”
Adrian leaned forward. “Then give it to me straight. What does APEX do?”
Elena swallowed hard, her voice barely audible over the roar of the blades.
“It rewrites behavioral memory. It doesn’t just influence decisions—it builds new ones from scratch. Who we are, what we believe… our loyalties, our fears. APEX doesn’t control people by force.”
“It makes them want to obey.”
The silence that followed felt heavier than gravity.
Liana finally broke it. “We’re flying blind, and Julia knows it.”
Elena nodded. “We land in Geneva. We get to the vault. And we shut it down from the inside.”
“And if we can’t?” Adrian asked.
Elena turned to him slowly, her eyes harder now, sharper.
“Then we destroy everything it’s built on.”
Geneva – Private Terminal – 3:47 PM (Local Time)
A sleek black SUV pulled up outside the discreet gates of a glass-clad terminal.
Inside, Julia King stepped out, flawless as always in tailored grey, her tablet tucked under one arm. A private jet waited on the runway.
She paused, glancing down at her comm. A notification blinked:
“CHIP ACTIVATED. SIGNAL LINKED. FILE INJECTION PENDING.”
She smiled to herself.
“Just a little longer.”
A shadow moved behind her, but she didn’t flinch.
“They’ll come,” she murmured to the wind. “They always do.”
Geneva Bound – Private Jet – 6:41 PM
Night had fallen by the time the engines leveled. Inside the jet’s cabin, Elena sat at the window, face lit faintly by the terminal glow of the encrypted tablet Ezra had given her. The chip was inserted. Files decrypted.
But what stared back at her didn’t just chill her.
It cracked something inside her.
Project APEX wasn’t just global.
It was generational.
Profiles spanned continents—young minds flagged as “candidates.” Every one of them tagged by identifiers drawn from healthcare records, academic performance, online behavior.
A digital blueprint of how to reshape them.
Not with propaganda.
Not with war.
But with code, and subtle repetition.
“Build trust. Bury truth. Replace memory.”
The line echoed again and again in the internal protocol memos.
A single tear slipped down Elena’s cheek before she wiped it away.
Adrian stepped into the cabin quietly, watching her for a moment.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
She turned the screen toward him.
His eyes scanned the files, then locked on the project’s location node. Geneva wasn’t just the vault.
It was the launch site.
“If that server goes live,” she whispered, “the world won’t even know it’s been rewritten.”
Adrian took a breath. “Then we don’t let it go live.”
“We’ll be going against Julia.”
“Then we stop trusting masks. Hers. Ours. All of them.”
A beat passed.
“What if we’re too late?” she asked quietly.
Adrian took her hand.
“Then we fight from the ashes.”
Geneva – Black Archive Facility Perimeter – 10:06 PM (Local Time)
Outside the towering vault, security drones hovered like ghosts in the fog. A figure in a long coat stood in the shadows, watching the approach of the jet from afar.
He pulled up a comm.
“They’re en route. Elena has the chip. Adrian’s with her.”
A voice crackled in response.
“Let them in. Let them believe.”
He nodded once, then turned toward the vault.
The doors were already opening.
Above the Atlantic – Jet to Geneva – 11:03 PM
Elena sat alone in the cabin, the chip resting on the fold-down table like a curse waiting to be activated. The decrypted files on Ezra’s device were still unraveling — slowly, maliciously intelligent.
She ran her fingers through her hair, her body humming with the pressure of it all. Every name in the APEX protocol carried weight. Every line of code was a betrayal.
“Julia knew,” she whispered aloud to herself.
Not by accident.
Not by chance.
By design.
“I trusted her.”
She turned at the sound of footsteps. Adrian entered, sleeves rolled up, hands bruised from the fight earlier, but his gaze steady.
“You shouldn’t be alone with that thing,” he said, nodding at the chip.
“It’s already too late,” Elena muttered. “The signal was activated when I plugged it in. Julia planned this—every move. Ezra thinks we still have a shot. But I don’t think we’re trying to stop APEX anymore.”
Adrian frowned. “Then what are we doing?”
She looked at him, voice low, ragged. “We’re walking straight into its launch sequence.”
Adrian stared at the flickering code. “Then we need to burn it to the ground.”
“With Julia still inside?”
Elena’s eyes searched his face, but Adrian didn’t flinch.
“If she’s the architect,” he said, “then she built herself into the collapse.”
Silence settled.
“You don’t hesitate anymore,” Elena said after a moment.
“You taught me how not to.”
She reached for his hand — not out of romance, but resolve. The war they were heading into had nothing to do with love anymore.
It was about who the world would belong to when the last secret fell.
Meanwhile – Geneva Vault Facility – 1:36 AM
Julia stood inside the command hub of the underground archive. She watched the map flicker as Elena’s location synced into the system.
“Almost time,” her assistant murmured.
Julia didn’t look up.
“When she steps into the vault,” Julia said coldly, “lock it. No override. No exit.”
“Understood.”
Julia’s expression darkened.
“She thinks this is about exposing me. But I’m not the one hiding anymore.”
The city above was waking to a cold drizzle, but beneath its streets, something colder stirred something buried in silence and secrecy.
Elena stood before a rusted freight elevator, flanked by cracked brick walls and the scent of damp concrete. The address Julia had sent her led here—a derelict textile factory shuttered for over a decade. There were no lights. No signage. Just decay.
But beneath it was a man she thought had died six years ago.
Ezra Vale.
Her godfather. Her father’s closest confidant. A ghost with blood on his hands.
Adrian shifted beside her. “Still want me to go in with you?”
She shook her head, jaw tight. “He won’t talk if you’re there.”
He didn’t argue. Instead, he handed her a compact device—tracker and comms combined. “Tap twice if anything feels off.”
“Everything already feels off,” she murmured.
The elevator groaned as she stepped inside. With a sharp tug of the lever, it descended, the shaft swallowing her in dim light and echoing steel.
Sublevel Three – 8:46 AM
The doors opened into silence.
A long corridor stretched ahead—white-tiled, clinically lit. Not dust-covered like she expected, but maintained. Deliberately hidden, not forgotten.
She stepped cautiously forward, boots soft on the tile.
At the end of the hall stood a steel door with a biometric panel. Before she could react, it hissed open.
And there he was.
Ezra Vale.
Older. Leaner. Wearing a grey sweater and sharp eyes that hadn’t softened in six years. He stood beside a desk, arms folded, like he’d been expecting her for days.
“Elena,” he said quietly.
Her stomach twisted. That voice—it shouldn’t still sound familiar.
“You faked your death,” she snapped. “You let us all grieve. Why?”
Ezra didn’t flinch. “Because grieving is cleaner than betrayal. And I betrayed more than one person.”
“You betrayed my father.”
“I protected his greatest secret.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Me.”
Ezra exhaled and moved to a console on the desk. “You always were the sharp one.”
“Don’t flatter me. You built Project Helix. You helped turn me into an experiment.”
“Not turn,” he said calmly. “Preserve. You were in Helix before you even had a name.”
She froze.
“What does that mean?”
Ezra looked at her with something like regret. “Your father didn’t just fight the system. He infiltrated it. He made a deal to get close to the people funding Helix. In exchange, he gave them something valuable—someone they could ‘observe’ over time.”
Her throat tightened.
“Me.”
“You weren’t just observed. You adapted. You resisted.”
Ezra brought up a file on the console—her name, her age, brain scans, neural response data logged over the years. All of it coded under Case 17B.
Elena’s knees almost gave.
“You were part of this. And you let me think you were dead.”
“I had to disappear,” Ezra said. “Because I learned something that changed everything. Helix wasn’t the endpoint.”
He tapped the screen. Another file opened.
PROJECT: APEX
A simple phrase blinked at the top of the report:
“Control the memory, control the identity.”
Elena stepped back. “What is this?”
Ezra looked at her, gaze heavy. “APEX is the next phase. Not conditioning. Not rewriting. Replacing. An entire generation of minds—restructured from the inside out.”
“Why show me now?”
“Because the program activates in 72 hours. And you’re the only person who can stop it.”
Above Ground – Textile District – 8:59 AM
Adrian stared at the elevator door, jaw locked.
Inside, she was walking into her past. Into a history he’d never been allowed to fully understand.
Behind him, Liana’s voice crackled through comms.
“Heads up. Satellite intercept shows activity at the Geneva Vault. Someone’s trying to access the fail-safe server. Could be a sweep.”
Adrian swore. “They know we’re close.”
“Too close,” Liana replied. “If they shut that server down before Elena finds what she needs—”
“Then we lose our only bargaining chip.”
Sublevel Three – Ezra’s Lab – 9:03 AM
Ezra slid a data chip across the table toward Elena.
“This contains the trigger codes. If uploaded to the Geneva server, it can stall APEX. Maybe long enough to expose it.”
Elena didn’t touch it.
“Why should I trust you?”
Ezra held her gaze. “Because I never stopped protecting you. And because there’s someone else who’ll activate APEX if we don’t move first.”
“Who?”
Ezra hesitated.
Then he said a name that made her stomach drop:
“Julia King.”
Sublevel Three – Ezra’s Lab – 9:05 AM
The air between them froze.
“Julia?” Elena repeated, disbelief cracking in her voice. “You’re saying she’s behind APEX?”
Ezra’s gaze didn’t falter. “I’m saying she’s not who she says she is.”
He turned the monitor toward her again. Lines of encrypted communication flickered onscreen—surveillance logs, digital handshakes, backdoor keys. One in particular bore her name as sender. But she had never sent it.
“What is this?”
“An impersonation protocol,” Ezra explained. “Someone has been routing off-grid transmissions using your identity. Julia covered the tracks. I traced the signal to a satellite node she has exclusive access to.”
Elena’s pulse throbbed in her ears. “She’s been helping me… feeding me files.”
“She’s been feeding you what she wanted you to see. Just enough to guide your choices but not enough to derail the bigger plan.”
“No. That doesn’t make sense. She helped me expose Helix she risked herself for that.”
Ezra folded his arms. “Exactly. She helped take down Helix… so APEX could rise in its place.”
A long silence settled.
Elena stared at the data chip still lying on the table. Just a sliver of plastic and wire, but it might hold the power to stall a global psychological reset. Or worse trigger it early.
“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” she whispered.
“Then trust the one thing you’ve never faked,” Ezra said. “Your instincts.”
She looked up. Her eyes burned, but her spine stayed straight.
“If Julia’s lying… I need proof. If we’re wrong about her, we lose an ally. But if we’re right—”
“You won’t just lose an ally,” Ezra cut in grimly. “You’ll have to bring down the only person keeping your father’s last protection protocol online.”
Montreal – Safehouse Perimeter – 9:14 AM
Adrian paced near the black sedan as Liana tapped through incoming feeds on her tablet.
“You think she’s safe down there?” Liana asked without looking up.
“She’s not,” Adrian said. “But she’s in control.”
“You always think she is.”
“Because she always is.”
Liana glanced up. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
Adrian stilled.
The question wasn’t a trap it was a lifeline she threw him, to force the admission he kept shoving down.
“Love makes people reckless,” he said eventually.
“So does denying it.”
Sublevel Three – Exit Hallway – 9:17 AM
Elena moved down the corridor with the chip clutched in her palm, Ezra’s final warning echoing behind her.
“If you’re going to Geneva, go dark. No comms. No uploads. Assume Julia’s watching every node.”
“And if she is?”
“Then she’ll know exactly what you’re coming to find.”
The elevator came into view.
But just before she reached it, a screen embedded in the wall flickered to life.
A grainy feed of Julia King appeared—mid-conference, speaking to someone off camera, unaware she was being recorded.
“She doesn’t suspect a thing,” Julia was saying. “Let her follow the trail. Once she plugs in the chip, the access key will activate. APEX will begin.”
The video looped.
Once. Twice.
Elena’s stomach dropped.
She had been the trigger all along.
Montreal – Rooftop Extraction Point – 9:32 AM
The elevator doors slammed open.
Elena emerged into the morning drizzle, face pale, jaw clenched, chip still burning in her palm like a loaded gun. Adrian was already there, waiting beside the chopper.
One look at her face, and his whole posture changed. “What happened down there?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Instead, she climbed into the chopper and strapped in, the storm swirling in her head too loud for words. Liana met Adrian’s eyes silently, then followed Elena inside.
Only once they were in the air did she finally speak.
“Julia knew. She knew everything.”
Liana’s brows pinched. “About Helix?”
“About me. About the chip. About Project APEX. She’s been playing all sides.”
Adrian’s jaw clenched. “And Ezra?”
“He gave me the chip. But he also gave me something worse.”
She held up the small data drive.
“He gave me the truth.”
Adrian leaned forward. “Then give it to me straight. What does APEX do?”
Elena swallowed hard, her voice barely audible over the roar of the blades.
“It rewrites behavioral memory. It doesn’t just influence decisions—it builds new ones from scratch. Who we are, what we believe… our loyalties, our fears. APEX doesn’t control people by force.”
“It makes them want to obey.”
The silence that followed felt heavier than gravity.
Liana finally broke it. “We’re flying blind, and Julia knows it.”
Elena nodded. “We land in Geneva. We get to the vault. And we shut it down from the inside.”
“And if we can’t?” Adrian asked.
Elena turned to him slowly, her eyes harder now, sharper.
“Then we destroy everything it’s built on.”
Geneva – Private Terminal – 3:47 PM (Local Time)
A sleek black SUV pulled up outside the discreet gates of a glass-clad terminal.
Inside, Julia King stepped out, flawless as always in tailored grey, her tablet tucked under one arm. A private jet waited on the runway.
She paused, glancing down at her comm. A notification blinked:
“CHIP ACTIVATED. SIGNAL LINKED. FILE INJECTION PENDING.”
She smiled to herself.
“Just a little longer.”
A shadow moved behind her, but she didn’t flinch.
“They’ll come,” she murmured to the wind. “They always do.”
Geneva Bound – Private Jet – 6:41 PM
Night had fallen by the time the engines leveled. Inside the jet’s cabin, Elena sat at the window, face lit faintly by the terminal glow of the encrypted tablet Ezra had given her. The chip was inserted. Files decrypted.
But what stared back at her didn’t just chill her.
It cracked something inside her.
Project APEX wasn’t just global.
It was generational.
Profiles spanned continents—young minds flagged as “candidates.” Every one of them tagged by identifiers drawn from healthcare records, academic performance, online behavior.
A digital blueprint of how to reshape them.
Not with propaganda.
Not with war.
But with code, and subtle repetition.
“Build trust. Bury truth. Replace memory.”
The line echoed again and again in the internal protocol memos.
A single tear slipped down Elena’s cheek before she wiped it away.
Adrian stepped into the cabin quietly, watching her for a moment.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
She turned the screen toward him.
His eyes scanned the files, then locked on the project’s location node. Geneva wasn’t just the vault.
It was the launch site.
“If that server goes live,” she whispered, “the world won’t even know it’s been rewritten.”
Adrian took a breath. “Then we don’t let it go live.”
“We’ll be going against Julia.”
“Then we stop trusting masks. Hers. Ours. All of them.”
A beat passed.
“What if we’re too late?” she asked quietly.
Adrian took her hand.
“Then we fight from the ashes.”
Geneva – Black Archive Facility Perimeter – 10:06 PM (Local Time)
Outside the towering vault, security drones hovered like ghosts in the fog. A figure in a long coat stood in the shadows, watching the approach of the jet from afar.
He pulled up a comm.
“They’re en route. Elena has the chip. Adrian’s with her.”
A voice crackled in response.
“Let them in. Let them believe.”
He nodded once, then turned toward the vault.
The doors were already opening.
Above the Atlantic – Jet to Geneva – 11:03 PM
Elena sat alone in the cabin, the chip resting on the fold-down table like a curse waiting to be activated. The decrypted files on Ezra’s device were still unraveling — slowly, maliciously intelligent.
She ran her fingers through her hair, her body humming with the pressure of it all. Every name in the APEX protocol carried weight. Every line of code was a betrayal.
“Julia knew,” she whispered aloud to herself.
Not by accident.
Not by chance.
By design.
“I trusted her.”
She turned at the sound of footsteps. Adrian entered, sleeves rolled up, hands bruised from the fight earlier, but his gaze steady.
“You shouldn’t be alone with that thing,” he said, nodding at the chip.
“It’s already too late,” Elena muttered. “The signal was activated when I plugged it in. Julia planned this—every move. Ezra thinks we still have a shot. But I don’t think we’re trying to stop APEX anymore.”
Adrian frowned. “Then what are we doing?”
She looked at him, voice low, ragged. “We’re walking straight into its launch sequence.”
Adrian stared at the flickering code. “Then we need to burn it to the ground.”
“With Julia still inside?”
Elena’s eyes searched his face, but Adrian didn’t flinch.
“If she’s the architect,” he said, “then she built herself into the collapse.”
Silence settled.
“You don’t hesitate anymore,” Elena said after a moment.
“You taught me how not to.”
She reached for his hand — not out of romance, but resolve. The war they were heading into had nothing to do with love anymore.
It was about who the world would belong to when the last secret fell.
Meanwhile – Geneva Vault Facility – 1:36 AM
Julia stood inside the command hub of the underground archive. She watched the map flicker as Elena’s location synced into the system.
“Almost time,” her assistant murmured.
Julia didn’t look up.
“When she steps into the vault,” Julia said coldly, “lock it. No override. No exit.”
“Understood.”
Julia’s expression darkened.
“She thinks this is about exposing me. But I’m not the one hiding anymore.”
End of Beneath the Billionaire Mask Chapter 59. Continue reading Chapter 60 or return to Beneath the Billionaire Mask book page.