Chapter 3 - Chapter 2: Echoes in the Ledger

Elara Nyx didn't sleep that night. The Hong Kong skyline bled neon into the darkness outside her Mid-Levels window, but inside, the glow came only from her screens. The glitch had been too precise—too deliberate—to be random code drift.She ran the wallet addresses through every tool she had: Chainalysis tracers, Elliptic analytics, even a custom script she'd written years ago for sniffing dark-pool transactions. The trail was faint, deliberately muddied by mixers, but it didn't vanish. It looped back to a single point of origin: a Cayman Islands trust registered under Elara Holdings. Her own ghost. She had created Elara Holdings in 2018 as a digital smokescreen—a shell entity with no real assets, just enough blockchain breadcrumbs to confuse trackers if anyone ever came looking for Adira Miller. It was supposed to be dead code. Forgotten. Instead, someone had resurrected it and parked billions in seized Venezuelan Bitcoin inside. She leaned back, rubbing her eyes. The time stamp on the last transfer: three days ago. Three days after she'd last spoken to Logan about Cherri's pregnancy scan.Coincidence? She didn't believe in those anymore. Her secure line pinged. Logan. She answered on the second ring.His face appeared, shadowed in the Johannesburg safe house. "You're up late.""So are you." She kept her voice steady. "Tell me you're not staring at the same ledger I am."Logan's jaw tightened. "I got a tip from Anonymous. Same addresses. They're calling it the 'reset seed.' Billions in clean crypto, ready to flood markets when the dollar tanks."Elara's pulse kicked. "And the shell is my old decoy. Someone knows who I was.""Or who you are." He paused. "Cherri's been having nightmares. Says she feels eyes on her. I've doubled the perimeter sensors, but…""But it's not enough." Elara finished for him. "Mia called me earlier. Connor's asking why everything feels 'weird.' He's seven, Logan. He shouldn't know what weird feels like."Silence stretched between them."I'm pulling Jake in," Logan said finally. "He's got the security firm's resources. If anyone can lock down Mia and Connor without drawing attention, it's him."Elara nodded. Jake—her oldest, the one who'd always been more soldier than son. His private security company was legitimate on paper. The black-ops contracts he took on the side… those were the ones that worried her."Tell him to stay ghost," she said. "No chatter. No patterns. If they're watching the family, they're watching him too."Logan rubbed his face. "And you? What's your next move?"Elara stared at the screen, at the glowing trail of Elara Holdings. "I'm going to follow the money. All the way to the source.""Don't go alone," he warned. "If Viktor's involved—""If Viktor's involved," she cut in, voice cold, "then this isn't just about money. It's about control. And I taught him everything he knows about staying hidden."She ended the call before he could argue. Then she opened a fresh terminal, fingers already moving. The reset seed wasn't just a stash. It was bait. Someone wanted her to bite.She would. But not the way they expected. Outside, Hong Kong never slept. Inside, the shadows were starting to move.