The operating room's pierced her pupils. Alice Howard struggled on the edge of anesthesia. She felt her throat being cut open, the pain of the chip being yanked out with forceps like an electric shock. Ryan Black clenched his fists outside the glass window; his eagle tattoo flushed red with rage, and the monitor showed her heart rate teetering on collapse.
"She has to live." Ryan roared at the doctors, then turned to answer an encrypted call. The mysterious figure on the screen revealed half of the board chairman's face: "Black, do you have the chip? Or is it still in her stomach?" Ryan ended the call, sticking a wiretap to the gap under the operating room door—Alice's life or death had become a bargaining chip in a three-way game.
Three days game.
Three days later, Alice woke in a private ward, her throat wrapped in bandages. Ryan leaned over to feed her warm water, his fingers trembling: "You almost died… why swallow the chip?" She replied in a hoarse electronic voice, with Sarah in the next room translating via a vocal cord repair device: "Because evidence is only useful if the person holding it is alive." Ryan suddenly kissed her, roughness laced with desperation: "Alice, I'm not Mark… My father was a board bastard, controlled by them with drugs. My mother killed herself after giving birth to me." His tattoo cracked in his tears, revealing a tiny hidden chip beneath the skin—a monitoring device implanted when he was made a "pawn."
Passion erupted amid the shock of truth. Alice bit his shoulder during climax, blood mixing with tears: "Your pain isn't a privilege. It's proof of their crimes." Ryan's counterattack turned violent, yet he stopped mid-suffocation: "I need you alive to take down the board." In a haze of desire and confession, they forged a new alliance: he'd provide the inner codes to the bastard network, and she'd detonate public outrage with the chip's evidence.
On the seventh night of rain, Sarah's hacking alert shattered the silence: "Mark's been imprisoned by the board! They're planning to use his death to bury all crimes!" The three stormed the secret prison, only to find Mark negotiating with another mystery man. The figure wore an eagle totem mask, handing Mark a USB full of drug funds: "Stanton, you're more useful than we thought." Alice's wiretap caught the key exchange—the masked man's voice belonged to Ryan's father, one of the architects of the bastard network.
Gunfire erupted in the prison. Ryan took a bullet for Alice, shattering the chip in his tattoo. Sarah the security system with an EMP. They dragged the masked man to an abandoned dock. When the mask fell, Ryan's father screamed: "Bastards are born to die for the family!" Alice projected the chip's evidence onto a container wall—the full truth of the merger fraud, drug ring, and bastard control scheme laid bare. The father swallowed a cyanide capsule, cursing as he died: "You'll never escape the Blood Eagle curse."
Rain stopped before dawn. Mark sneered amid the ruins: "You won the data war, but the board has one last weapon." He showed a newly implanted nano-bomb on his wrist: "Surrender all evidence, or Manhattan's financial district gets vaporized." Alice suddenly kissed him, passing an encrypted command with her lips: "Sarah, activate the reverse detonation." Mark's bomb self-destructed as they clung to each other. His pupils reflected Alice's resolve: "Now we're all holding cards.