I stood frozen, the phone still pressed to my ear long after the dial tone had cut to silence. The air in the executive suite, which had felt so triumphant moments ago, was now thick with a new, colder kind of dread.
"Xavier?" Alexandra's hand was on my arm, her brow furrowed in concern. "Who was that? You look like you've seen a ghost."
I slowly lowered the phone, my mind racing through every security protocol we had. "The Swiss vault," I whispered, my voice sounding like gravel. "They say it's empty. And they know everything, Alexandra. They know about the gala, the board... they even called you the 'Ice Queen'."
Alexandra's grip tightened. She didn't flinch. "Okoro? No, he's too broken to pull this off so fast. This is someone else. Someone who has been watching us from the beginning."
"They want me at the old Lagos docks at midnight," I said, my 'voice like iron' returning, though this time it was tempered with a protective fury. "They told me to come alone, or they'd make sure you 'melted'."
A flash of that old, defiant fire sparked in Alexandra's eyes. "They clearly don't know me very well if they think I'm just going to sit in this office and wait for a rescue. If my family's legacy is at risk, I'm going with you."
"It's too dangerous," I argued, already reaching for my encrypted tablet to track the restricted call. "If the vault is truly empty, it means my grandfather's 40% stake—the very thing keeping the vultures away—is a ghost. We have fourteen hours before the market opens and the news of an empty vault leaks. If that happens, Obinna Global will collapse by noon tomorrow."
We spent the afternoon in a "war room" setup, bypassing our own company security to ensure no leaks. By 11:30 PM, the humid Lagos air was heavy with the scent of salt and diesel as we approached the outskirts of the abandoned shipping district.
I parked the black SUV three blocks away. "Stay in the car, Alexandra. The doors are reinforced. If I'm not back in twenty minutes, drive straight to the safe house in Ikeja."
"Xavier—" she started, but I silenced her with a kiss that tasted of desperation and a promise.
"I lost my name once," I told her, checking the weight of the small, concealed device in my jacket. "I'm not losing you."
I stepped out into the darkness. The docks were a graveyard of rusted containers and screaming gulls. At the end of Pier 7, a single lantern flickered. Standing beneath it was a figure wrapped in a heavy trench coat, looking completely out of place in the Nigerian heat.
As I got closer, the figure turned. It wasn't a thug. It wasn't Okoro. It was a woman, her face lined with age but her eyes sharp enough to cut glass.
"You have your grandfather's walk, Xavier," she said, her voice the same raspy one from the phone. "But do you have his stomach for the truth?"
I stopped ten feet away. "Who are you? And where is the Vane inheritance?"
The woman stepped into the light, pulling a tarnished silver key from her pocket—a key that matched the emblem on my grandfather's ring perfectly.
"The gold and the shares in Switzerland were a decoy, boy. A trap for the greedy. Your grandfather knew that one day, the directors would come for it. The real treasure isn't in a bank. It's buried under the very soil you're standing on."
Before I could ask another question, the sound of a dozen car doors slamming shut echoed through the shipyard. Headlights blinded us from every direction.
We weren't alone. We had been walked straight into an ambush.