The soft clacking of keys filled Cabin Twelve, its dim screen glow reflecting in Marcus's focused eyes. Around him, the gaming café hummed with muffled voices and keyboard mashing, but in this private booth, there was silence. Precision. Control.
He wasn't fighting on a battlefield of swords anymore. This war was waged with firewalls and buried logs.
Marcus leaned in.
"Let's see what secrets you're hiding, Leonard," he murmured.
He'd gained access to the internal server of the Wembley mansion—a hidden backup Leo had shielded behind a complex digital smokescreen. Most of the security footage from the day of Leo's death had been erased. But in the world of data, even ghosts leave shadows.
The logs revealed a single, chilling truth: the footage between 4:15 PM and 5:05 PM—right when Leo supposedly overdosed—had been deliberately deleted.
And just before it happened, someone had logged in.
The name made Marcus still.
Adam Cornwall.
The head butler. Fifteen years of service to the Wembley family. The one man who had access to every room, every hallway, every server. The perfect inside agent. Loyal. Discreet. Invisible.
Marcus narrowed his eyes. "Too perfect."
The deletion wasn't messy or rushed. It was surgical—calm, confident, practiced. Adam hadn't panicked. He had followed a plan.
"Who gave the order?" Marcus whispered. "Paul? A sibling? Or was Adam acting on something even deeper?"
He leaned back slightly, letting the weight of the discovery settle in. His instinct screamed that Adam didn't act alone. But he needed proof, and proof required time.
Marcus encrypted the logs and stored them deep in a hidden folder under Leo's old alias—Spyder.
He couldn't return to the Wembley mansion yet. Not until he had more than theories. For now, he needed resources.
He logged in to the dark web, under the name that once made cyber-criminals and corporations alike uneasy—Spyder.
The inbox lit up instantly. Job requests. Dozens.
But Marcus had no interest in quick bucks or small-time hacks. He filtered the messages for high-risk, high-payout contracts. Leo had once ruled this space, and now Marcus would use that legacy.
He selected three of the toughest jobs available.
The first was a military-grade breach to retrieve a deleted offshore arms transaction. It was classified as an S-class job, and the client had masked their identity through multiple encrypted layers. Most hackers would spend five hours trying and fail.
Marcus cracked the server in just over twenty minutes, exploiting a dormant access tunnel buried in the bank's legacy indexing system. He entered, retrieved the file, and left without tripping a single alarm. The payment of $38,000 hit his wallet seconds later.
The second job was no less dangerous—neutralizing a blackmail file spread across three independent offshore servers, each syncing every four seconds with heartbeat protocols. If the sync was interrupted, the files would detonate onto public servers.
Marcus emulated the heartbeat sync, masked the rewrite sequence, and killed the failsafe mid-cycle. Thirty minutes later, the files were gone. Another $42,500 earned.
He was already preparing to shut down when a message caught his eye. A job marked "unsolved." Several veteran hackers had tried and failed.
The client offered $100,000.
It was a security blackout breach against a private data vault hosted on a triple-layer quantum encryption node—believed to be impossible.
Marcus took a breath. Then accepted.
Fifty-two minutes later, the vault was cracked. Data extracted. No alerts triggered. The funds appeared in his crypto wallet like a whispered nod of respect from the dark web itself.
Spyder had returned.
He leaned back in his seat. Three contracts, nearly $200,000 earned. Reputation restored. Or perhaps, elevated.
With an hour still left on his café session, he decided to move.
He needed a place to think. Not a rental. Not a bunker. Just a temporary refuge with enough comfort to plan.
A private luxury hotel room did the trick.
Marcus walked into the East Meridian Hotel under a pseudonym. Paid in cash. Choose the suite with no cameras in the hallway and a backdoor exit near the service lift.
He was halfway to the elevator when his senses sharpened.
He was being followed. He knew it who it was. Mr. Black, the hound of Paul Wembley.
He didn't turn or panic. Just kept walking, heart steady.
Once inside his room, he locked the door.
Back in the suite, Marcus stood at the floor-length window, gazing at the city lights below.
Leo's body still bore remnants of fear, scars left by a lifetime of being ignored, dismissed, and now discarded. But inside that body burned the soul of Marcus Roland.
A warrior.
A prince.
And a man who never let betrayal go unanswered.
He lay back on the soft hotel bed, hands behind his head, eyes staring at the ceiling.
Plans began to form.
A killer to expose.
A kingdom to reclaim.
And a name to resurrect—from shadow to legend.
Leo Wembley may have died forgotten.
But Marcus Roland would make the world remember.