The red bar climbed past twelve percent before Leandro could blink.
Baltasar did not stand there admiring his luck or savoring the lingering heat on his mouth. He spun on the heel of his Italian dress shoes, caught Cosima by the wrist, and bolted toward the maintenance corridor behind the stage.
"Security!" Leandro’s screech cut through the chamber orchestra’s waltz, shrill enough to crack stemware. "Restrain that impostor! Seize him!"
Churro poked his scaly snout out of Baltasar’s thermal pouch, hissed violently at an approaching guard in a gold-trimmed uniform, and snapped his jaws shut on an hors d’oeuvre tray as they zipped past. Pigs-in-a-blanket tumbled across the Persian runner like tiny, pastry-wrapped bowling pins.
"Where are we going?" Cosima demanded, hiking her satin train over one arm without missing a single stride in four-inch stilettos. "He has direct satellite uplink to the Navarro trust accounts! If that counter reaches one hundred, my family’s shares collapse into his offshore shell!"
"Then we don't bother canceling the signal," Baltasar panted, kicking open the service door marked *ELECTRICAL & MEDIA DISTRIBUTION*. "We reroute the target. He thinks he's buying an empire. I'm about to hand him an audit."
The Gala’s master broadcast booth smelled of ionized dust, copper heat sinks, and burnt coffee. Racks of fiber-optic switchboards towered toward the concrete ceiling, blinking in patterns of cool cyan and violent amber. A solitary sound operator, wearing bulky headphones and eating a tuna wrap, froze mid-chew as Baltasar hauled the heavy steel door shut behind them, threw the manual deadbolt, and shoved the insulated satchel onto the primary sound console.
"Out," Baltasar told the operator, pointing a sharp thumb over his collar.
"Hey, you can't be in here, this is the AV-"
Cosima reached into her evening purse, pulled out a thick wad of bearer bonds, and slapped them flat against the worker's chest. "Take the emergency exit, darling. Buy yourself a modest duplex. Run."
The worker let go of his sandwich, grabbed the paper, and vanished through the fire door before the latch clicked.
"Lock the auxiliary access," Baltasar muttered, ripping his tuxedo jacket off and tossing it onto a rolling swivel chair. The bow tie followed, yanked loose with one quick jerk.
He cracked his knuckles, slid the crystalline proxy key Cosima had given him into the central port of the terminal rig, and slammed an unshielded patch cord into the Gala's master video array. His ancient, battered field deck boots loaded in three seconds flat. The familiar emerald prompt flickered to life, its blinking cursor greeting him like a venomous pit viper waking from a long, bitter winter.
`CASCABEL // SHELL ACCESS RESTORED.`
"Thirty-eight percent," Cosima announced, her gaze locked on the small wall-mounted monitor relaying the gala floor. Leandro was currently attempting to batter through the heavy metal door outside, shouting muffled obscenities while two guards threw their bulk against the reinforced hinges. "Baltasar, hurry."
"I am hurrying," he snapped, though his focus never drifted from the cascading green syntax. "I spent three months riding a broken fifty-cc moped through grease traps and freezing rain, Navarro. I don't write slow code. I write vindictive code."
He didn't waste clock cycles trying to decrypt Leandro’s military-grade firewall. That was amateur play. Leandro wanted a pipeline? Baltasar gave him an ocean trench.
With half a dozen brutal keystrokes, he mirrored Leandro’s uplink packet and inverted the destination node. Instead of sending the proxy confirmation back to the private escrow vault, Baltasar hijacked the grand hall's thirty-foot holographic centerpiece—the one currently projecting a tasteful, rotating logo of the Navarro Foundation—along with every auxiliary LED wall lining the banquet hall.
"Bring up the ledger from the sports car run," Baltasar barked.
Cosima snatched his thumb drive, plugging it into the secondary bus. "The shell transfers to the Cayman maritime account?"
"That's appetizer. Give me the city contract bribes. Give me the Animal Control requisition receipts he signed under his mother’s maiden name."
"Got them," she murmured, her manicured nails flying across the sub-panel. Her mouth curved into something feral and utterly un-heiress-like. "He billed twenty thousand dollars of city pound funding to ‘exotic pest eradication.’ The absolute bastard."
"Let's show the board what an exotic pest looks like," Baltasar said.
Outside, the heavy oak double doors of the grand hall rattled as Leandro finally gave up on the metal door and returned to the main stage, clutching a cordless microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" Leandro’s amplified voice boomed through the master control room’s studio monitors. "Do not be alarmed by the minor disturbance. An unhinged, terminated gig laborer has breached our private network in a desperate extortion stunt! Security is handling it. The merger vote proceeds as planned!"
"Wrong," Baltasar muttered under his breath.
He hit the execution return.
`EXECUTE: CASCABEL_BITE.SH`
The reception floor plunged into instantaneous blackness.
The string quartet choked on a high note. The collective murmur of three hundred billionaire donors, city council members, and international financiers died in a single, stunned intake of breath.
Then, the grand holographic projection roared back to life, glowing in piercing, unmissable crimson.
It did not display the Rivo Tech merger confirmation.
Instead, towering four stories tall above the crystalline ice sculptures, was Leandro Navarro’s private DashGo dashboard. Side-by-side with his face, captured in high-definition from his own webcam, were three columns of undeniable financial treason.
The left column exposed the systematic siphon of twelve million dollars from the Navarro Charitable Wildlife Trust directly into an offshore account titled *L.N. HOLDINGS CORP*.
The center column showcased the internal DashGo server logs, showing Leandro’s unauthorized commands to fabricate delivery infractions, starve independent contractors out of their tips, and manipulate algorithmic payouts.
And on the right, blown up to the size of a billboard, was Leandro’s signed municipal dispatch slip, dated three hours ago: *IMMEDIATE SEIZURE AND EUTHANASIA ORDER: 44 RESCUE ANIMALS AT 1202 COSTA BLVD. CHARGE TO MUNICIPAL OVERHEAD.*
The crowd did not just gasp; it erupted.
"What is the meaning of this?" shouted the elderly Duchess of Valverde from the front row, spilling her vintage champagne across her lap.
"Is that... our pension fund?" a city councilman roared, pointing a trembling, ringed index at the offshore routing numbers. "Leandro, you thieving rat!"
Leandro stood on the dais, bathed in the garish crimson glow of his own sins. His microphone slipped from his hand, producing a shrieking burst of feedback as it hit the marble floor. He looked up, his complexion draining to the shade of sour milk, as his own voice echoed through the speaker towers, an audio log Baltasar had scraped from Leandro’s personal cloud drive playing at deafening volume:
*"Let the old man rot in his hospice bed. Once Hector dies, Baltasar won't have the paperwork to fight me, and Cosima will sign whatever I put in front of her to keep her filthy stray dogs alive."*
Cosima leaned over Baltasar's shoulder in the control room, watching the miniature feed. A single, triumphant laugh tore from her throat. "You magnificent, petty monster."
"I told you," Baltasar said, leaning back in the swivel chair and crossing his boots on the console edge. "I don't lose. Not to a man who wears velvet slippers in public."
Churro clicked his claws against the mixer desk, swelling his bright orange throat fan in absolute agreement.
"We need to get down there," Cosima said, her amusement hardening into resolve. "The board is already calling the district attorney. Don Hector is still on that floor."
Baltasar swung his feet from the desk, his smirk vanishing instantly. "Right. The grandfather."
He snatched his satchel, letting Churro burrow deep into the padded lining, and shoved through the rear service exit. They cut through the banquet pantry, stepping over discarded silver trays, and burst back into the chaotic ballroom just as Leandro broke into a blind, desperate sprint toward the exits.
"Stop him!" Cosima shouted, her voice ringing clear over the tumult of screaming aristocrats.
Leandro halted abruptly. He saw Baltasar emerging from the corridor, tux rumpled, eyes gleaming with open contempt.
Something inside Leandro snapped completely. The veneer of the polished heir vanished, replaced by the cornered fury of a gutted predator. He grabbed a heavy crystal champagne flute from a nearby linen-draped table, slammed the base against the carved mahogany railing, and lunged directly at Baltasar, the jagged glass aimed straight for his throat.
"You ruined me!" Leandro shrieked, spitting bile. "You gutter rat—"
Baltasar braced to twist aside, but before he could close the distance, a dull, heavy *crack* echoed across the landing.
A carved ironwood walking cane struck the broken flute from Leandro’s grip, sending shards flying across the polished floor.
Don Hector Rivo stood upright on trembling, ancient legs, having hauled himself completely free of his motorized wheelchair. His frail chest heaved with exertion, his tuxedo hanging loose on his gaunt frame, but his grip on the silver-headed cane was unyielding as iron.
"Touch my grandson again, boy," the old patriarch wheezed, his voice razor-sharp, "and I won't just ruin your company. I will erase your name."