Chapter 32 - The Counter-Strike
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I walked out of Allenwood with exactly twenty-four hours left on the clock.
I didn't call Marcus. I didn't call the police. Sabrina Croft was too well-connected, too insulated by her father's billions, to be frightened by standard legal threats. She had the altered ledger, and she was entirely willing to pull the trigger.
I needed a different kind of weapon.
I drove straight back to Chicago, arriving at our penthouse just as the sun was setting. Elena was pacing the living room, a storm of anxiety etched across her face.
"Where have you been?" she asked, rushing over to hug me tightly. "Marcus called. His cyber team is hitting a brick wall with the IP proxies. They can't trace the email."
"They don't need to," I said, gently pulling back and looking into her eyes. "It's Sabrina Croft."
Elena gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. "Julian's ex? But she testified against him!"
"She played everyone," I explained rapidly. "She has the forged ledger, and she's using it to orchestrate a hostile takeover of our firm. If she gets control, she'll bury the housing project and liquidate the assets to feed her father's conglomerate."
"Arthur, we have to go to the FBI," Elena pleaded. "We have to tell them the document is a forgery before she leaks it."
"If we go to the feds now, the investigation will freeze our accounts for years," I argued, shaking my head. "The project will die on the vine. The families waiting for those homes will lose everything. We can't play defense, Elena. We have to go on the offensive."
"How?"
I walked over to the large windows, looking out at the city skyline. I had spent ten years trying to be the good son, the ethical CEO, the man who played by the rules while his family cheated. But Sabrina wanted a street fight.
"Sabrina isn't invincible," I said, a cold, dangerous resolve settling into my chest. "If she helped Julian set up the offshore shell companies, her digital fingerprints are buried somewhere in those transactions. Julian took the fall because she erased her name from the primary documents. But nobody can erase everything."
I turned back to Elena. "Call David."
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David was the brilliant, slightly eccentric forensic accountant I had hired to audit my mother's trusts years ago. He was a savant at finding ghosts in digital ledgers.
"I want David to dig into the original, unaltered audit files," I instructed, my voice hard. "Tell him to stop looking for Julian’s money, and start looking for Sabrina's shadow."
