My husband had me locked in a windowless subterranean holding room beneath our Chicago estate, claiming I had suffered a severe psychotic break.
I walked back into the central server room, the silence now settling heavier than ever. Felix Drake sat hunched over a console, quietly wiping his hard drives. His face was still pale, but a new resolve had settled in his features.
He looked up as I entered, his eyes wary. “Mr. O’Leary… he didn’t…?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He understands. You helped him recover his money. You’re clean.”
I reached into my pocket, pulling out a small, physical ledger drive. It wasn’t O’Leary’s. It was my own. It contained $500,000 in untraceable cryptocurrency fees from my old auditing company—a fund I had kept hidden, a contingency for the life I’d built from nothing.
I placed it on the console in front of him. “This is for you, Felix.”
He stared at it, his jaw slack. “What is this?”
“Catch the 6:00 AM flight out of O’Hare,” I told him, my voice firm. “To Oregon. There’s a new identity waiting for you there. A clean slate.”
Felix looked at the drive, then at me, his eyes wide with disbelief and gratitude. “I… I don’t understand. Why?”
“You chose to do the right thing,” I said simply. “You intervened. You saved a life. That’s worth more than any price Julian could have paid.”
I looked around the server room, at the flickering monitors, the humming machines. “Never return to corporate security work, Felix. You’re better than that. Find a different path. One that lets you sleep at night.”
He nodded slowly, picking up the drive. A genuine, if tentative, smile touched his lips. “Thank you, Maya. Really. Thank you.”
I left him there, amidst the quiet hum of the servers, turning toward the sound of the cleanup crew already at work in the loading dock. A new future for Felix, forged in the wreckage of Julian’s ambition.
More Stories
+ There are no comments
Add yours