Chapter 2 - The Hidden Ledger
I sat on the edge of my cheap mattress staring at the letter my dead wife had hidden.
The paper trembled in my calloused hands.
Rebecca had always been the quiet, observant type during our dreadful Sunday dinners with the Sterling family.
I never knew she was quietly gathering evidence against them.
Her letter explained that shortly before her fatal car crash, she had accidentally overheard Blake talking on his private cell phone.
He was secretly funneling millions of dollars out of the company’s pension fund.
He was using offshore accounts hidden under fake shell companies to hide his tracks.
Rebecca wrote that she had secured a copy of a digital ledger onto an encrypted flash drive.
She had hidden the flash drive inside the lining of her old winter coat.
I immediately rushed to the hallway closet and tore through the garment bags.
I found her navy blue peacoat and ripped the interior silk lining apart.
A small silver USB drive fell directly into my palm.
I plugged it into my old laptop, praying the files were not corrupted by time.
A massive spreadsheet filled the screen with hundreds of illegal transactions.
My brother had not just stolen from the company.
He had stolen from the retirement accounts of the working-class people I spent every day repairing furnaces for.
I scrolled to the very bottom of the document and found something that made my blood run entirely cold.
There was a large payout made exactly two days before Rebecca’s brakes supposedly failed on the highway.
The payment was sent to the lead mechanic at the auto shop where she had her car serviced.
My wife did not die in a tragic accident.
My golden brother had her murdered to keep his embezzlement a secret.
I looked through the bedroom door at June, who was sleeping peacefully with a bandage under her eye.
I realized that simply walking away from my family was no longer an option.
I was going to have to destroy them completely.
The only problem was that I had no money, no power, and no influence.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the number of an old client I had done HVAC work for.
He was a retired corporate raider who owed me a massive favor.
I told him I needed to learn exactly how to dismantle a billion-dollar empire from the inside out.
He agreed to meet me at midnight in a diner across town.
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When I arrived at the diner, my contact was not sitting alone in the booth.
He was sitting across from the very mechanic who had sabotaged my wife's car.
