Chapter 5 - The Dark Motel
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Margot drove her sedan north toward a quiet, forgotten motel along the edge of Lake Erie, far away from the penthouse apartment she had shared with Trevor in Ohio City.
When she tried to pay for the room at the front desk, her personal credit card was declined.
"System says account restricted, ma'am," the young clerk said, looking at her bruised cheek with a mixture of pity and discomfort.
Margot didn't flinch. She reached into the secret lining of her leather purse, pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills she had withdrawn months ago for emergencies, and laid two bills on the counter.
"Three nights," Margot said calmly. "No receipts."
Ten minutes later, Margot sat on the edge of a worn bed in Room 114. The room smelled faintly of pine cleaner and old rain. She opened her personal, unlinked laptop—the silver machine Trevor had never bothered to check because he assumed she did all her work on the firm's network.
She plugged in an encrypted silver flash drive.
A series of complex spreadsheets filled the screen. Thousands of lines of environmental testing data, soil density metrics, and municipal drainage specs for the East Bank project.
On paper, Trevor had presented the city with a clean, sixty-million-dollar flood mitigation system designed by a top-tier engineering firm.
But when Margot pulled up the actual subcontractor payout logs, the numbers didn't match.
Twelve million dollars earmarked for deep-bore concrete drainage pipes had been rerouted through a shell company registered in Delaware called Voss Holdings.
Margot stared at the screen, her dark eyes reflecting the cold blue light of the monitor.
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Voss Holdings didn't belong to a construction company.
It belonged to Briana Voss.
