Keep reading—the biggest twist is still ahead.

The rain was coming down in sheets, a cold, miserable deluge that turned the ruins of the family estate into a muddy, unrecognizable mess. I sat in the back of the car, my heart hammering, my clothes soaked, holding the handful of tapes I’d grabbed from the trunk. Marcus sat beside me, his face grim, his eyes fixed on the house as the sirens began to wail in the distance.

"We have to go," he said, his voice a low, urgent warning.

I looked at the tapes. There were five of them. Five reels of magnetic tape, each labeled with a date and a series of names I didn't recognize.

"What do we do now?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

"We take them to the archive," Marcus said, starting the car. "If we can digitize these, we can prove not just what they did, but who they were."

We drove in silence, the city lights flickering past the windows, the weight of the tapes in my lap feeling like a thousand pounds of lead. I was no longer a husband, or a son. I was the person who held the history of the Syndicate in his hands.

We reached the archive, but it was empty.

The computers were dark, the servers silent.

"They’ve been here," Marcus whispered, his face going pale.

"They couldn't have been," I said, looking around the room. "The site is secure."

"They don't need to break in if they already own the building," Marcus said, pointing to a small, red blinking light on the wall—the same light I had seen at the mansion.

We were being watched.

We were being tracked from within the facility itself.

I looked at the tapes, then at the terminal. I realized that the only way to save the information wasn't to play it, but to hide it.

"We have to broadcast them," I said, a desperate thought forming in my mind. "We don't need the server. We need the city’s public broadcast network."

"That’s impossible," Marcus said. "The Syndicate owns the entire city’s transmission grid."

"Not all of it," I said, grabbing the portable drive from my bag. "I remember the old emergency transmission system—the one the city built during the Cold War. It’s still connected to the city’s radio towers, but it’s completely analog. It’s completely outside the digital grid."

"That’s a suicide mission," Marcus said, looking at me. "You’d have to climb the tallest tower in the city to override the manual switch."

"I'll take the climb," I said.

I didn't wait for him to argue. I grabbed the tapes, my sidearm, and my bag, and turned to the exit.

I wasn't a son. I wasn't a husband. I was a man who had finally realized that his life was a lie, and the only way to be free was to burn the lies to the ground.

I walked into the dark, the rain hitting my face, the tower rising in the distance like a challenge.