How to Tame a Silver Fox – Episode 26
Christina’s hands trembled around the gun, but the barrel remained pointed at Harper. The basement office had become painfully still, every person measuring the distance between fear and disaster. Chris moved half a step forward before Harper warned him back with a glance.
“Give me the file,” Christina said. Her usual arrogance was gone, replaced by the strained obedience of someone following orders she did not understand.
Cole positioned himself beside the desk. “Your father used mine, and now he’s using you.”
“Shut up.” Christina’s aim shifted toward him. “You don’t know anything about my family.”
Harper noticed the wireless earbud hidden beneath Christina’s hair. Someone was listening—and directing her from outside the room.
“Your father can hear us, can’t he?” Harper asked. Christina’s eyes flicked toward the staircase, confirming it.
A man’s voice hissed faintly through the earbud. Christina flinched, then ordered Harper to slide the file across the floor.
Harper lifted the folder but did not release it. “If he cared about protecting you, he wouldn’t have sent you into a room with an armed security team.”
The logic struck its target. Christina looked toward Chris’s two guards and seemed to realize how disposable she had become.
The voice in her ear sharpened. Her finger tightened against the trigger, and Chris’s restraint reached its limit.
He knocked over a metal shelf. The crash made Christina turn, giving Harper the instant she needed to throw the file beneath the desk.
Chris crossed the room and twisted the weapon from Christina’s hands without firing it. One guard secured the gun while the other opened the hidden door.
Christina collapsed against the wall, furious tears cutting through her makeup. “He said he’d ruin Becca if I didn’t do it.”
“Who?” Harper asked, though she already suspected the answer.
“My father.” Christina stared at the floor. “Sebastian Fawkes works for Victor Sloane. He’s been laundering money through university donations for years.”
Cole reached beneath the desk for the file, but a masked figure appeared in the open doorway and fired at the lights. Darkness swallowed the room.
When emergency lamps blinked on, the file and Cole were both gone. A smear of blood marked the stairs, but no one knew whether it belonged to him or his attacker.
Christina removed the earbud and handed it to Harper. A final recorded message played through it in Sebastian’s voice: “Bring me the ledger, or Mark Reeves dies before sunrise.”
