Luis nods as if that’s exactly the point.
Then he pulls a battered old computer from beneath a shelf, the kind of machine you’d never allow on your network, the kind nobody thinks to sabotage.
You plug in the USB.
The screen flickers, then fills with folders labeled by date, time, and names you recognize too well.
CFO. Legal. Investor Relations. Board Liaison.
Your stomach twists because you can already feel the shape of betrayal forming.
Luis clicks a file.
A video opens.
It’s your conference room. Your boardroom. The one with your name etched into the glass.
On screen, you see your CFO, Miranda Kessler, leaning over the table with two men you’ve never met.
Their faces are half-shadowed, but their voices are clear, recorded by a forgotten security cam angle that nobody bothered to disable.
Miranda says your name the way someone says “target.”
Then she slides a folder across the table and whispers, “The market will believe it if we leak it in the right order.”
Your heart starts pounding so hard you feel it in your fingertips.
Luis pauses the video and looks at you, calm as a man who’s already made peace with storms.
“I recorded that screen from the security office,” he says. “They thought only the day team mattered.”
He clicks another file. “This is the part where they decide to burn you.”
The next clip shows a private hallway outside Legal.
Miranda hands your general counsel a flash drive.
You can’t hear the words, but you can read the body language: the stiff shoulders, the quick glance both ways, the urgency of people doing something they’ll deny forever.
Then the audio file plays, taken from a maintenance microphone Luis installed years ago to catch leaks in the ventilation system.
“Make it look like Ethan signed off,” Miranda says.
“Create the audit trail, then freeze the accounts and let him walk into the blast radius.”
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