Chapter 2

Bertram's face was darker than before.

He didn't spare me another glance. He turned and picked up the internal line.

Less than two minutes later, the head of security pushed the door open.

Two guards seized me by the arms, one on each side. One of them looked me over and curled his lip.

"And here I thought you office types were something special. Turns out you're just a common thief. Shameless."

A few coworkers craned their necks in the hallway to watch.

Jade trailed alongside, sighing.

"Such a quiet, decent-looking girl. How could you do something like this? The company spent six months training you, and now you've put everyone in an impossible spot."

She sighed again, wearing the look of someone deeply disappointed in me.

At the door of the conference room, a guard shoved me hard in the back.

"Move it. Quit dragging your feet!"

I stumbled forward, my knee slamming into the arm of a chair. The pain blacked out my vision, and I caught the edge of the table just to stay on my feet.

The door locked behind me with a bang.

I sat down. The ache in my knee slowly faded into a hot, prickling numbness.

Right then, I quickly pulled out my backup phone and sent messages to the bank and the police.

Bertram and the rest of them probably thought that smashing my phone had cut off any way for me to reach the outside world.

About ten minutes later, the lock clicked again.

Libby James, the finance manager, walked in.

Bertram came in behind her, pulled the door shut with his free hand, and leaned against it with his arms crossed.

Libby slapped the stack of papers down in front of me.

"The receiving account is under your name and your ID number. The money came in ten separate transfers, every one on record. Care to explain?"

I glanced down at the bank statement, at row after row of deposit entries.

Libby didn't give me a chance to speak.

"I hear your mother had surgery last month. The cost came to exactly three hundred thousand. Nobody blames a family for having hard times, but no matter how hard things get, you don't steal from the company. That's theft."

The statement is forged. The bank card was opened by Bertram using your stolen ID. Every one of those deposit records is fake.

Libby is helping him close the trap. They picked your mother's surgery on purpose, to build you a perfect motive.

I stared at the statement, my chest tight, like something was lodged in it.

They were turning my mother's illness into a knife, stabbing me with it over and over, and still expecting me to kneel down and confess?

When Bertram saw I wasn't talking, he dragged over a chair and sat down across from me.

"Speaking of which, how's your mother doing these days?"

My fingers clenched the fabric of my pants over my knee.

"Early-stage liver cancer, right? Just had the surgery last month. I hear it ran about three hundred thousand."

"See for yourself. The timing lines up, the amount lines up. When I hand this material to the police, what do you think they'll conclude?"

He leaned in, arms braced on the table, eyes fixed on mine.

"A daughter, scraping together surgery money for her own mother, siphons three hundred thousand from the company. A perfect motive, matching timeline, complete paper trail."

"Do you think the police will believe you, or me?"

But I had never told a single coworker my mother was sick.

How did Bertram know all this in such detail?

He started digging into you before you were even hired. Your file, your home address, the medical records of your immediate family, he has all of it.

He chose you as the scapegoat long ago.

His goal was never to investigate anything. It's to break you. The quieter you stay, the more anxious he gets.

This trap didn't start today.

Maybe from the moment I handed my hiring paperwork to HR, he'd already been laying the groundwork.

"You saved your mother's life."

Bertram stood, walked to the side of my chair, and looked down at me.

"But if you don't sign today, I promise you won't even make it to her next checkup."

"Think it over. If you get locked away, who's going to take care of that sick mother of yours?"