Chapter 101 The Room Goes Quiet
Brittany’s POV
The screens fired and the room changed in an instant. I stood in the dead center of the ballroom floor and watched Harrison’s face on nineteen different displays. I felt, surprisingly, very little about the man himself. There was no sudden surge of hatred. There was no rush of fear or the shaking in my limbs that I had expected for years. Instead, I felt only a clean, architectural satisfaction. It was the cold, quiet feeling of a plan executing exactly the way we had drawn it on the whiteboard in the bunker. I saw the pixels of his old death certificate glowing next to his living, breathing face. It was the end of a thirty-year lie, and I was the one who had pulled the curtain back. I watched the guests freeze in place. I watched the waiters stop in their tracks with silver trays tilted at dangerous angles. This was the moment I had dreamed about for months.
Then the screens flickered. It was a quick, jagged stutter that made the images jump. It was not the kind of smooth transition Leo usually produced. I knew his systems inside and out by now. His code was elegant and precise. It did not produce a half-second lag like that unless something was fighting it from the outside. Something was interfering with our broadcast. I felt the first spark of alarm in my chest. I reached up and touched my earpiece with a shaking hand, pressing the plastic into my ear to hear better.
"Leo? Do you hear me? The feed is jumping," I whispered.
I got nothing but a wall of heavy, gray static. It was not the hollow sound of a signal drop. It was the specific, harsh grinding sound of a communications block. Someone was jamming the channel with professional-grade equipment. I looked around the room, my eyes searching the crowd for David. I needed to see his face. I needed him to tell me that this was just a technical glitch we could fix. I did not find him in his last position near the pillars. The spot where he had been standing was empty. The space was now occupied by a group of panicked investors who were shouting into their dead cell phones.
I turned my head toward the side of the stage. I looked for Sophia. I found her six feet away, leaning heavily on her silver-tipped cane. She was watching me with an expression that told me she was reading the room the same way I was. She looked worried. Her eyes moved from the flickering screens to the emergency exits. She saw the same cracks in our victory that I was starting to see. She took a step toward me, but the crowd was becoming too dense.
The mass of people around Harrison was thickening by the second. The press was moving toward him like a school of sharks smelling blood in the water. Event staff in black vests were trying to push through the mass of bodies to restore some kind of order. It was the organic chaos of a room processing a massive, reality-breaking revelation. People were shouting questions that no one could answer. Cameras were flashing so fast and so bright that it felt like a lightning storm was happening inside the building. Harrison was at the center of it all. He was still standing perfectly still. He was still wearing that terrible, thin smile of a man who knew something the rest of us did not.
In the middle of that chaos, I saw something that made me go very still. My blood turned to ice. I looked at the main stage where Adam had been standing just a moment ago. He had been the face of the Phoenix Line. He had been the one claiming my mother's work as his own. But the stage was empty now. The microphone stood alone in the spotlight. Adam was gone.
"Where did he go?" I muttered to myself.
I felt a cold prickle of dread on the back of my neck. Adam was the weak link in the Blackwell chain. He was the one who had the most to lose tonight. If he had disappeared while we were all looking at his father, it meant something was very wrong. I started to move toward the stage, pushing my way through the frantic crowd. I shoved past a group of women who were crying and pointing at the monitors as if they were seeing a ghost.
"Out of the way! Move!" I snapped.
I reached the edge of the runway and climbed the small set of stairs. I looked at the document wallet that had been sitting on the podium. It was wide open. The leather was scuffed as if it had been grabbed in a hurry. It was empty. All of the original sketches were gone. Those were the only physical proofs of my mother's handiwork. They were the drawings with her specific pencil marks and the coffee stains from the nights she stayed up late in her studio. Without those sketches, the digital files were just data that a lawyer could argue away. We needed the physical evidence to link the Blackwells to the theft thirty years ago.
"No," I breathed. My hands were shaking as I touched the empty leather. "Not now. Not after all of this."
I looked toward the back of the stage. There was a heavy black velvet curtain that led to the loading docks and the private service elevators. It was swinging slightly, the fabric rippling as if someone had just run through it. I felt a firm hand on my shoulder and I jumped, nearly screaming. I turned around and saw Daisy. She looked pale and her eyes were darting around the room. She was slightly breathless, her chest heaving as she tried to find the words.
"Daisy? What happened? Where is David? Did you see Adam?" I asked. I gripped her forearms, needing her to focus.
She shook her head quickly. She looked like she had seen something that terrified her. She gripped my arm with surprising strength, her fingers digging into my skin. She leaned in close so I could hear her over the roar of the ballroom.
"I saw him, Brittany," Daisy said. Her voice was thin and brittle. She was taking short, sharp gasps of air. "He didn't hesitate. He went out the back through the service door. He has the sketchbook. The physical one. He took it from the document wallet when I was watching the screens. I tried to stop him, but he was too fast. He shoved me aside." She paused, her eyes filling with a sudden, sharp panic. "Brittany. He's heading for the parking structure."
Daisy appeared at my shoulder from the direction of the stage and said, slightly breathless: "He went out the back. He has the sketchbook. The physical one. He took it from the document wallet when I was watching the screens." A pause. "Brittany. He's heading for the parking structure."