Chapter 18 - the secret inside the notebook
Adrien held Sophie tightly against his chest, shielding her with his body as he rolled behind a massive marble pillar while suppressed rounds chipped away at the stone above them. Marco fired three quick rounds, neutralizing the advancing gunman instantly. With the immediate threat neutralized, Adrien looked down at Sophie, checking her frantically for any injuries. The little girl was unhurt, clinging tightly to his neck, her small hands clutching her slightly scuffed pink notebook against her dress.
Moretti backup tactical units smashed through the ballroom’s secondary glass doors, flooding the hall with high-powered flashlights and overwhelming the remaining Vance mercenaries. Within minutes, the lights were restored, revealing a scene of subdued chaos. Julian Vance’s grand ambush had failed entirely, his strike force neutralized or captured by Adrien’s superior defenses. As emergency personnel arrived to clear the panicked guests, Adrien carried Sophie back to Claire, who collapsed in relief, kissing her daughter’s face with tears pouring down her cheeks.
While Marco’s men secured the building, Sophie opened her pink notebook to a page she had been working on during the gala. She pointed her tiny finger at a series of detailed sketches she had drawn while watching the crowd earlier that evening. She had drawn the face of a high-ranking Moretti security officer named Viktor—a man who had worked for Adrien for five years—and drawn a small red circle around his wrist. Beside the sketch, she had written in messy child's print: He has the same snake tattoo as the bakery man.
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Adrien stared at the drawing, his heart chilling. Viktor was the head of his estate’s internal communications team, the only man who possessed the master codes to the estate’s power grid and security cameras. It was Viktor who had disabled the ballroom lights from the control room upstairs, acting as Julian Vance’s high-level mole inside the Moretti organization. Sophie’s keen observation had uncovered the single traitor that Adrien’s top intelligence team had failed to identify.
Adrien kissed Sophie’s forehead, praising her as his smartest little detective. Leaving the girls under Marco’s heavy guard, Adrien took three senior soldiers and marched up to the ballroom’s master security control room. He kicked the reinforced door open to find Viktor frantically trying to wipe the server hard drives and escape through a service ladder. Caught red-handed, Viktor pulled a sidearm, but Adrien disarmed him in a single brutally swift motion, pinning the traitor against the cold metal server rack with an unforgiving grip on his throat.
