The temperature in the room spiked violently as a roaring whoosh echoed from the hallway. The gasoline had ignited. Orange flames licked at the edges of the doorframe, blistering the expensive wood.
Think like an auditor, Olga told herself, her ballet-trained discipline taking over her rising panic. Find the structural weakness. Find the exit route the architect didn't put on the official blueprint.
Her eyes locked onto the massive, built-in mahogany bookcase behind Davies's desk. The university was built in the 1920s, during Prohibition. Wealthy administrators often had private, hidden access shafts built into their offices to smuggle in liquor.
Olga grabbed the heavy brass lamp from the desk and smashed it against the wooden panels of the bookcase. The wood splintered, revealing not a brick wall, but a hollow, dark space. She swung the heavy brass base again and again, adrenaline fueling her muscles until she shattered enough of the backing to reveal a narrow, dusty dumbwaiter shaft.
The fire breached the office door, a tidal wave of heat and flame surging into the room.
Without hesitating, Olga dove headfirst through the splintered bookcase and into the narrow, vertical shaft. The ropes of the old dumbwaiter had long rotted away. She braced her back against one side of the brick shaft and her feet against the other, suspending herself in the darkness just as the Principal's office exploded into an absolute inferno above her.
Using her incredible core strength, Olga slowly shimmied down the brick chimney, the bricks scraping her arms and tearing her clothes. The roar of the fire above sounded like a jet engine. After thirty agonizing feet of descent, her boots hit a solid wooden floor.
She kicked out the maintenance hatch and tumbled into the freezing, damp basement of the administration building.
Coughing violently, her face covered in soot, Olga scrambled out of the basement and into the freezing North Carolina night. Sirens wailed in the distance as fire trucks rushed toward the campus. She stood in the shadows of the quad, watching the top floor of the administration building burn against the black sky.
Davies had tried to burn her alive. He was ruthless, brilliant, and completely untraceable.
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But as Olga caught her breath, she realized she had one single advantage. Davies had orchestrated this entire thirty-year conspiracy. He had funded her fake father, Jack Vance, to hide her. Which meant Jack knew exactly who Davies was. Jack had met him. Jack had taken his money.
👉 Olga wiped the soot from her face, her eyes burning with a terrifying, absolute resolve, knowing her next stop was the Charlotte Federal Penitentiary to interrogate the man she had just put behind bars.
The Charlotte Federal Penitentiary was a brutal, imposing fortress of concrete and razor wire. Olga sat in the sterile, fluorescent-lit visitor’s room, her hands resting calmly on the steel table. She wore a pristine white trench coat, hiding the bandages on her arms from the fire the night before.
The heavy steel door opposite her buzzed open.
Jack Vance was led into the room in handcuffs, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit. The fifteen-year sentence had aged him a decade in just a few months. His arrogant, slicked-back hair was gray and thinning, his posture broken. When he saw Olga sitting at the table, he stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes widening in pure terror.
"Sit down, Jack," Olga commanded softly.
The guard forced Jack into the bolted metal chair and stepped outside, leaving them alone. Jack stared at her, his hands trembling against the steel table.
"Are you here to gloat?" Jack whispered, his voice hoarse. "You took everything from me, Olga. The company, my son, my freedom. What else could you possibly want?"
"I want a name, Jack," Olga said, her voice dropping to a lethal, quiet register. "I want the true identity of the man you call Principal Davies."
Jack’s breath caught in his throat. The remaining color drained entirely from his face. He looked frantically at the security camera in the corner of the room, then back to Olga.
"I... I don't know what you're talking about," Jack stammered, but his eyes were darting wildly with unmistakable guilt.
"Don't lie to me," Olga hissed, leaning forward. "Grandpa Arthur’s trust fund wasn't family money. It was a payoff. Davies paid you two point four million dollars in 1998 to raise me, to hide me from Elias Thorne. He sat in the front row of my graduation and watched me destroy you. He used me to wipe out the Thorne Syndicate, and last night, he tried to burn me alive."
Jack began to shake uncontrollably. "If I say his name, Olga... he will kill me. He has eyes in here. He has eyes everywhere."
"If you don't say his name, Jack," Olga replied, her eyes cold as ice, "I will personally buy the debts you owe to the Vanguard investors, and I will ensure Blake’s sentence is moved from a minimum-security resort to a maximum-security black site. You will never see your golden boy again."
Jack choked out a sob, burying his face in his manacled hands. He was completely broken.
"His name isn't Davies," Jack whispered, terrified. "His real name is Victor Kaelen. He is the Architect. He didn't just fund Elias Thorne and Elena Rostova... he built the entire global shadow banking system they used. Thirty years ago, Elena stole his biometric algorithm to create your ten-billion-dollar trust. Victor has spent decades trying to get it back."