My Cult-Leader Brother Called Me A Lowly Flu-Shot Nurse At Our Council Luncheon — Then A Two-Star General Saluted Me As Colonel
While Caleb was still at the main gates, loudly challenging the county deputies and ignoring the growing military presence, Elijah Kincaid moved with quiet purpose. His face remained neutral, but his eyes held a cold, new determination.
He slipped into Caleb’s private office. The room was empty, Caleb’s chair still askew from his earlier rampage. The air still hummed with his frantic energy.
Elijah sat at Caleb’s desk. With practiced ease, he bypassed the screen lock on the terminal. He knew Caleb’s shortcuts, his preferred file structures. He had, after all, helped set them up.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, navigating through layers of encrypted folders. He wasn’t looking for Hannah’s funds anymore. Carver’s panicked confession echoed in his mind: “the syndicate’s escrow.”
He found it. A hidden directory, tucked away behind a fake accounting software interface. Inside, “off-book accounts.”
The numbers on the screen made Elijah’s breath hitch. He scrolled through entries, his eyes scanning dates, amounts, and recipient codes. These weren’t tithe records. These were detailed logs of black-market funds, routed through the Sanctum’s myriad tax-sheltered entities.
And then, the bombshell.
A series of transfers, totaling exactly eight point seven million dollars, siphoned from an entity labeled “Phoenix Holdings LLC.” The notes detailed “land acquisition funds” and “development capital.”
Beneath each transfer, a signature. Not Caleb’s. It was Elder Thomas Finch’s signature.
Except Elijah knew Elder Thomas’s hand intimately. He’d seen his father’s signature on hundreds of documents over the years. This was a forgery. A meticulous, near-perfect forgery, but a forgery nonetheless.
Silas Drake. Phoenix Holdings LLC was known to be a front for Drake’s syndicate, the ruthless broker who secretly financed the enclave’s massive land acquisitions. The man whose money kept the entire Sanctum afloat.
Caleb hadn’t just been stealing from Hannah. He had been stealing from the syndicate. He had been forging his own father’s signature to siphon millions from one of the most dangerous men in the Southwest.
Elijah leaned back slowly in the chair, a cold dread settling in his gut. Caleb wasn’t just foolish. He was reckless. And traitorous. The consequences for this kind of betrayal would be swift, brutal, and entirely outside the purview of local law.
His allegiance wasn’t to Caleb, or even strictly to the Elder Council. It was to the Sanctum itself. And Caleb was about to bring it all crashing down.
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