She left him a message in blood. They left him no way out.
The morning calm of a quiet coffee shop shatters with a single call:
“She’s dead, Nate.”
Dr. Nate Shaw is pulled from his orderly world of forensic accounting into the aftermath of a brutal murder. The victim is Talia Winters—his most brilliant former student. At the crime scene, amid overturned furniture and the chemical sting of luminol, Nate finds a final message scrawled in blood. It’s a message only he can understand. A summons he can’t ignore.
Nate has built his career finding patterns no one else sees—following numbers to their hidden truths. It’s a gift that made him invaluable in lecture halls and courtrooms alike. It’s also a flaw. Because patterns can be manipulated. And someone is counting on Nate to miss the human hand behind the data.
Talia’s unfinished investigation leads him to Sentient Alpha, a revolutionary trading algorithm rumored to generate impossible profits. Publicly, it’s hailed as the future of finance. Privately, Nate discovers evidence that should not exist—proof the system can be aimed, triggered, and used to destroy targets with surgical precision. This isn’t fraud. It’s power. And the people behind it are shielded by money, influence, and legitimacy.
His only ally is Detective Ana Garcia, a by-the-book investigator bound by procedure and evidence. Nate works on instinct and inference. Garcia works the rules. As the body count rises and the conspiracy tightens, their uneasy alliance is strained by every corner Nate cuts and every line Garcia hesitates to cross.
Then the system strikes back. A witness disappears. Digital records vanish. A man is financially erased—then found dead. What was built to move markets is now taking lives.
Isolated and hunted, Nate faces a choice: walk away and let Talia’s death be buried, or risk everything by abandoning the safety of logic and starting to hunt the people hiding behind the numbers. In a world where information kills as cleanly as a bullet, truth comes at a price—and Nate may not survive paying it.
