Chapter 6 - The Confession in the Dark
I stood up slowly, clutching the forged wire mandate against my chest, my eyes locked onto Travis’s executive assistant.
"Who did it, Claire?" I demanded, my voice dropping into a low, fierce tone that surprised even myself. "Who signed my name to this document?"
Claire pressed her back against Travis’s mahogany desk, covering her face with both hands as silent, ragged sobs racked her body.
"It was me," she choked out behind her fingers.
The air in the room went completely still.
I stood frozen in the center of the Persian rug, staring at her as if she were a total stranger. "You?"
"I didn't have a choice, Eliza!" Claire wept, dropping her hands to look at me with desperate, bloodshot eyes. "Two years ago, when Travis began transferring capital out of the operational accounts to pay off his personal trading losses in crypto, he caught me noticing the discrepancies on the monthly reconciliations."
She took a shaky step toward me, holding her hands out in a pleading gesture.
"He threatened to ruin me, Eliza. He told me he would report me to the District Attorney for corporate embezzlement, claiming I had diverted petty cash funds. He had altered the administrative server logs to make it look like I was the one stealing! He told me if I didn't execute the wire authorization templates and mirror your signature from the old trust agreements, he would destroy my career and send me to prison!"
"So you agreed to frame me instead?" I whispered, my heart aching with a deep, sickening rage.
"I was terrified!" Claire cried softly. "He promised me that the money was just being moved to a tax-sheltered holding company. He told me you would get your share during the divorce settlement! I didn't know he was planning to use your night cleaning job to build a criminal case against you! I didn't know until three days ago when he brought in Victor Hale to draft the fraud report for the auditors!"
She reached out, grabbing my gloved wrist with desperate force.
"That's why I looked for you tonight, Eliza! That's why I placed you on the Apex shift roster for this floor! I knew they were meeting tonight to finalize the Cayman wire. I wanted you to hear it with your own ears! I wanted to give you the proof before he executed the final transfer at midnight!"
I looked down at the paper in my hand, then back at Claire.
"Where is the master digital file?" I asked coldly. "The original vector scan you used to mirror my signature onto this mandate."
Claire wiped her cheeks frantically with the sleeve of her silk blouse. "It's on an encrypted flash drive inside Travis’s personal floor safe behind the painting. But he holds the biometric key..."
"No," I said, a dark, dangerous clarity settling over my mind. "He holds his biometric key. But Travis never changed the secondary administrative override codes on the physical safe."
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Claire blinked in complete shock. "What?"
"I bought that safe eight years ago, Claire," I said, a cold, sharp smile touching my lips for the first time all night. "And I filled out the manufacturer's warranty registration."
