A male voice answers, smooth and amused. “And the board?”
Miranda laughs quietly. “The board wants the stock to dip so they can buy the pieces back cheap. They’ll thank me later.”
You sit back as if you’ve been shoved.
Your entire day replays in your mind like a sick magic trick.
The lawyers in the lobby, the investors demanding answers, the sudden “fraud allegations” that arrived with perfect timing.
It wasn’t chaos. It was choreography.
You grip the edge of the old desk in the closet and force air into your lungs.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” you ask.
Luis’s mouth tightens. “Because cops don’t arrest people who buy their kids scholarships.”
He points at the screen. “But federal agencies love paper trails. And this is a whole library.”
You scroll through the folders with shaking hands.
Emails. Contracts. Internal chat logs. A spreadsheet labeled “CONTROLLED LEAK CALENDAR.”
There’s a file called DEEPFAKE_AUDIO_TEST, and your skin goes cold again.
You open it and hear your own voice, clear as day, saying: “I approve the numbers. Push it through.”
Your stomach drops.
It sounds like you. It breathes like you. It even carries that slight pause you make before big decisions.
You feel your mouth go dry because you suddenly understand the weapon: they didn’t just steal your company, they stole your identity.
Luis watches you carefully.
“They used a voice model,” he says. “I heard them brag about it.”
He leans closer. “But the file metadata gives them away. And I recorded the meeting where they tested it.”
He clicks, and you hear Miranda say, “If it fools Ethan’s wife, it’ll fool Wall Street.”
You flinch at the casual cruelty.
You don’t even remember the last time someone spoke your name without wanting something from it.
And now you’re hearing people discuss your destruction like a Tuesday task list.
You stare at Luis. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
Luis exhales slowly.
“Long enough to be sure,” he says.
He looks down at his hands, rough and steady. “They started planning months ago. They thought you were too busy being a legend to notice the knives.”
He meets your eyes. “I kept telling myself someone else would stop it. But no one did.”
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