Chapter 8

Mika hesitated for only a second.

Then, she nodded.

“Yes.”

Elliot leaned against the table, arms crossed. “Good. Because I already put in a request for a deeper investigation.”

That made her pause. “So you knew something was off.”

“I had a hunch.” His smirk was brief. “But you just confirmed it.”

Mika didn’t respond right away. She stared at the data, an unease settling deep in her gut.

She had spent years uncovering hidden financial crimes, but this felt different.

This felt dangerous.

And for the first time in a long time, Mika wasn’t sure if she wanted to know what lay at the end of this particular trail.

Mika adjusted the brightness on her monitor, the glow of the screen reflecting in her dark eyes as she studied the data in front of her. The more she dug, the more wrong this felt.

The name buried in the metadata wasn’t just attached to one transaction. It was connected to dozens—all hidden within Avalon Holdings' vast network of financial movements. Whoever was orchestrating these payments wasn’t just moving money. They were burying it, layering transactions under shell companies, bouncing funds through offshore accounts designed to disappear under the weight of false audits and fabricated reports.

But not false enough.

Not to her.

Mika’s fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard, her screen filling with lines of code as she bypassed security redundancies, diving deeper into the encryption. The money was being funneled in consistent intervals, always routed through different sources, but with a pattern that was too controlled to be a coincidence.

Her breath slowed as she recognized what she was seeing.

This was funding.

Not just laundering. Not just corporate fraud.

Someone—something—was being financed through these accounts.

She opened a new window, running a cross-analysis of the accounts involved. Most of them had been flagged before in separate international investigations, but never connected to the same source.

Until now.

She leaned forward, reading through the flagged accounts, her eyes scanning the names of shell corporations, private investments, and encrypted transfers until one name stilled her hand over the keyboard.

The Morrígan Syndicate.

Mika’s pulse kicked up.

She had never seen that name before, but it carried weight. Power. There was something about it that sent an instinctive chill down her spine, something she couldn’t explain.

She ran another search, cross-referencing the name against criminal databases. The results that populated weren’t public. They were buried deep in government watchlists, sealed reports, intelligence briefings that shouldn’t be accessible to an analyst working for a corporate firm.

But she had access to things she wasn’t supposed to.

And she was already too far in to stop.

Her screen flickered with the results. The Morrígan Syndicate wasn’t just another criminal organization.

It was something far more dangerous.

Her eyes scanned the reports, her stomach tightening with every word she read.

High-level assassinations. International arms dealings. Political interference. Covert intelligence operations.

They weren’t just moving money. They were moving power.

Mika swallowed hard. This wasn’t just some corporate fraud scheme. This was something bigger. Something that stretched across governments, corporations, intelligence agencies.

Something that could get her killed for looking too closely.

She clicked on a redacted case file, scanning the information that hadn’t been blacked out. Interpol, CIA, MI6—they all had files on the Morrígan Syndicate. But no one had ever managed to infiltrate them, let alone shut them down.

Because no one knew who truly ran them.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she scrolled further. No known hierarchy. No known headquarters. Every member operated under strict compartmentalization, ensuring that even if one piece fell, the rest remained untouched.

Her breath caught when she saw the section on field operatives.

Killers.

Contract assassins operating in the highest levels of society, trained to eliminate, manipulate, and disappear.

And then, buried in a sealed intelligence file, she saw something that made her blood turn cold.

A list of targets.

The most recent one flagged as eliminated—a name she didn’t recognize.

The next?

Her hands clenched.

It wasn’t a name.

It was a company.

Grayson Analytics.

Mika’s breath hitched. Her company was a target.

She didn’t know why. Didn’t know what they had done to make an enemy out of a ghost.

But suddenly, it wasn’t just an anomaly anymore. It was personal.

A sharp knock on her glass office door made her jerk upright. She slammed the laptop shut, her heart pounding against her ribs as she looked up to see Elliot standing in the doorway, arms crossed.

“You look like you just saw a ghost,” he remarked, his sharp blue eyes flicking to her screen.

Mika forced a breath, masking the storm raging inside her.

“I think we have a problem,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her chest.

Elliot studied her for a moment before stepping inside, closing the door behind him.

“Tell me everything.”

Mika’s hands were cold as she shut her laptop, her heartbeat still hammering against her ribs. The Morrígan Syndicate. The name burned in her mind, pulsing with a weight she didn’t fully understand yet.

And her company was a target.

This wasn’t just an anomaly anymore. It wasn’t just another pattern in the numbers. This was something real, something dangerous.

She took a slow breath, forcing her pulse to steady. Panic wouldn’t help. Logic, data, analysis—that was what she did best. That was what would keep her alive.

She needed to tell Elliot.

Mika pushed back from her desk and grabbed her laptop, tucking it under her arm as she strode through the operations floor. The office hummed with low conversations and the rhythmic clicking of keyboards, employees buried in financial models and predictive analytics. But none of them knew what she had just uncovered.

Elliot’s office was at the end of the hall, enclosed by sleek glass walls that reflected the city skyline. He was inside, leaning back in his chair, one hand tapping a pen against the desk as he studied his monitor.

She knocked twice, stepping inside before waiting for a response.

Elliot barely glanced up. “That was fast.”

Mika shut the door behind her, her grip tightening on the laptop. “I found something.”

That got his attention. His sharp blue eyes flicked to her face, scanning her with a curiosity that quickly turned to caution.

She placed the laptop on his desk and opened it, pulling up the report she had been working on. “The transactions you flagged—they aren’t just irregularities. They’re structured. Coordinated.”

Elliot leaned forward, his elbows resting on the desk as he scanned the screen. “Go on.”

Mika pulled up the financial trail she had uncovered. “I traced the money through multiple shell companies and offshore accounts, but the patterns were too intentional to be laundering alone. It’s funding something.”

Elliot’s expression didn’t change, but she could see the way his fingers curled slightly against the desk.