The encrypted drive had been in her father's study.
Aarohi found it when she was twelve years old. She was small enough to fit in the space behind the bookshelf. Small enough to crawl into the dark and pull the loose brick from the wall. The drive was small and silver and cold in her hands.
She hid it for three years. She cracked its encryption when she was fifteen, using the codes her father had taught her, the patterns he had embedded in her memory like a message waiting to be decoded.
Now she sat in the safe house with Rohan beside her. She plugged the drive into his main computer. The files appeared on the screen.
Financial records. Communication logs. Photographs of men whose names had become synonymous with power. The Syndicate's early years, before the Council, before the Chairman, before everything went dark.
She had seen these files a hundred times. But tonight she looked closer. Tonight she found something new.
A name. Buried in a log file she had overlooked a hundred times. A name that made her blood run cold.
Vijay Mehra – Asset – Terminated.
Terminated. Not disappeared. Not missing. Terminated.
Her hands began to shake.
Rohan's arm came around her shoulders. "Arch. Talk to me."
"My father was not hiding," she said. "He was not protecting us. He was working for them. He was an asset. And they terminated him."
"We do not know that for sure. Terminated could mean they cut ties with him. It could mean—"
"It means they killed him." She closed the drive and set it on the table. "It means I have been hunting the people who killed my father."
Rohan stood and reached for her. "Aarohi—"
"Do not." Her voice was sharp. "Do not try to make this better. It is not better. It is worse."
She walked to the window and looked out at the city lights. Sixteen years of grief crashed over her.
Terminated.
She had spent her whole life running from her father's legacy. She had built an empire in the shadows to escape his memory. And now she had discovered that she had been walking in his footsteps all along.
"I am going to destroy them," she said. "Every single one of them. The Council. The Syndicate. Everyone who had a hand in his death."
Rohan moved to stand beside her. "Then I am with you. To the end."
She turned to look at him. This man who had never left. This man who had never stopped believing in her.
"To the end," she said.