When my boss, Victor Kroll, learned I had stage II lymphoma, he didn't offer sick leave.
The distinct creak of the old dockhouse vault door reverberated through the dimly lit office, far away from Gabriel’s dark basin facility. Nicolette Dupuis, Victor’s chief lieutenant, stood framed in the opening, a slender figure in the glow of her tactical flashlight. Her eyes, usually hard, glittered with a predatory calculation.
“He’s distracted,” Nicolette murmured to Marcus, who stood guard outside. “With Dempsey and Moreau causing trouble, Victor’s blind to what really matters.”
She slipped inside, the beam of her light dancing across the heavy steel shelves. Her target wasn’t cash or diamonds. It was the physical backup drives, the LEDGER disks that contained the raw, unencrypted data of Kroll Maritime’s true operations.
“This is it,” she whispered to herself, pulling on a pair of thin gloves. She knew Victor’s habits, his personal vault, the specific compartment where he kept the duplicate drives.
She had been feeding Victor false reports for months, shifting blame to me, orchestrating the $850,000 embezzlement that Gabriel had uncovered. But this was bigger. If she could pin everything—the money laundering, the illicit shipping—on both Victor and me, she would seize total control.
A small click. She found the compartment. Her fingers brushed against a stack of hardened drives, labeled with cryptic codes.
“Too easy,” she thought, a smirk playing on her lips. She slipped the drives into a lined bag. The moment she turned to leave, a shadow detached itself from the vault’s far corner.
“Leaving so soon, Nicolette?” Victor Kroll’s voice, cold and laced with menace, made her freeze.
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