If you don't shoot that monster by midnight, Arthur, I'll clear out your pension and fire you on the spot, my boss, Richard Callahan, barked across the estate desk.
My heart hammered in my chest. $4.5 million. It was a sum that could ruin a family, or save one, depending on whose side you were on.
I stood there in the workshop vault, the insurance form clutched in my hand, the plasma cutters gleaming beside me. The air felt thick with Richard’s deception.
A faint shuffle outside the workshop alley startled me. I quickly tucked the form back under the blueprints, closing the vault door softly.
I walked out into the cool night, my mind racing. Then I saw her.
Chloe Callahan stood just outside the alleyway, leaning against the rough-hewn timber of the workshop wall. Her arms were crossed, and the moonlight cast her face in stark relief. Her expression was unreadable.
“Arthur,” she said, her voice quiet. “I thought you’d be gone by now.”
My muscles tensed. Was she here to enforce her father’s orders? To make sure I was truly cut off?
“I had… some things to check,” I replied, my gaze lingering on the closed vault door.
She pushed off the wall and walked slowly toward me. Her eyes fell on the blue residue still faintly visible on my fingertips, despite my attempts to wipe it clean.
“Your hands are stained,” she observed.
I didn’t try to hide it. I looked directly at her. “Hydraulic fluid. From the harvester. And the tools in there.” I gestured subtly towards the vault. “Plasma cutters. Metal shears. They weren’t torn by an animal, Chloe. They were cut.”
I half-expected her to dismiss it, to defend her father. She was, after all, his daughter, and the family’s corporate legal advisor. Her initial blind loyalty had been clear during the family meeting.
Instead, she stopped a few feet from me, her brow furrowed in thought. Her usual corporate composure seemed to crack slightly.
“I… I saw something this morning,” she admitted, her voice lower now, almost a confession. “A new policy binder on my father’s desk. For emergency loss. $4.5 million.”
My breath caught. It confirmed what I’d just seen.
“He signed it eleven days ago,” she continued, her gaze fixed on something beyond me, perhaps wrestling with an uncomfortable truth. “I just assumed… it was a contingency for the general estate operations. For the new construction projects he’s planning.”
She looked back at me, her eyes clouded with a struggle I recognized. The conflict between family and truth.
“But… my father would never commit deliberate fraud, Arthur,” she insisted, her voice gaining a desperate edge, as if trying to convince herself more than me. “He’s ambitious, yes. Demanding. But not like this. There must be a misunderstanding.”
Her words hung in the air, a testament to her struggle. She’d seen the paper trail, but couldn’t yet connect it to the full, ugly picture. The scale of the deception was too much for her to accept, not from her own father. It was a denial I understood, but one that couldn’t last.
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