Page 106 of Billionaire’s Ruin

“The guard said…” Dave paused, jaw tightening. “He swears he doesn’t know. The door didn’t just open—they blew it apart. It happened fast.”

The injured man nodded frantically, hands trembling in the air as he tried to mimic the explosion. “Whoever stormed the room moved like trained soldiers,” he said in Mandarin. “Masks. Guns. No talking. No warnings.”

They.

My stomach dropped as if the floor vanished beneath me.

“Who’s they?” I demanded, voice cracking. “Who the hell were they?”

The guard’s pupils shrank. His lips trembled. “So many,” he whispered, voice thin and broken. “Very fast. Impossibly organized. I—I didn’t see faces.”

This wasn’t random.

This wasn’t sloppy.

This wasn’t desperate.

Whoever came had been trained.

Professionals.

And that made everything a thousand times worse.

My grip tightened on his collar, knuckles white. “Did they take Lucy? Kai’s mother? Answer me!”

I shook him so hard his teeth clattered. The shock, the fear, the helplessness burning through me like acid made it impossible to think.

“June—stop!”

Lincoln’s shout cracked through the chaos like a whip. His arms wrapped around me from behind, iron tight, prying my fingers off the guard.

“Calm down, honey,” he murmured against my ear, the gentleness at odds with the steel in his body.

I thrashed against him at first, fueled by sheer terror, by the unbearable image of Kai being dragged somewhere darker, somewhere I couldn’t reach him.

“Let me go! He knows something—he has to!”

But Lincoln didn’t let go. His grip only tightened until my breathing hitched, until anger gave way to something softer—something far more dangerous.

Fear.

A cold, hollow fear that spread through my ribs like cracks in glass.

“CCTV,” I gasped out, like a drowning woman reaching for air. “They must have cameras—every corner of this house has surveillance!”

Dave and Lincoln exchanged a look—and something in that look shattered me.

“I checked,” Dave said, finally.

My heart stalled.

“It really did happen fast,” he continued, voice low. ”Too fast. Nearly the entire system was taken offline.”

My breath caught.

“And the ones that were left…” He hesitated, jaw locking. “All of them wore masks. All except—maybe—one guy.”

“By the time the system rebooted, they had vanished. Whoever it was—they knew how to hack the system.”