Chapter 1
During the weekly wrap-up, the new intern suddenly switched the projector to my attendance record.
The eyes of the CEO and the entire company locked onto me in an instant.
The intern, Madison, tilted her chin up with a smug grin and slammed a stack of photos onto the mahogany conference table.
“Nate, I’m reporting her. She’s been using the company’s luxury vehicle to pick up her kid every single day. It’s a blatant misuse of company assets for personal gain. I move for immediate termination.”
Nate’s face turned as dark as a thundercloud.
I looked at this ambitious intern with a flicker of genuine pity. She was so desperate to climb the ladder that she hadn’t noticed the rungs were made of glass.
The company car she was referring to?
That was my Rolls-Royce Cullinan.
A $300,000 piece of machinery.
For the sake of closing deals and keeping the firm’s image afloat, I had let the company use it for free for two whole years.
The silence in the room was absolute, the kind of heavy quiet that comes right before a storm.
The central AC hummed at a steady sixty-eight degrees, but a chill still crept into my bones. It had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the coldness of human nature.
In the photos, the black Cullinan gleamed under the streetlights, parked in front of an elite private preschool. The angles were sharp, intentional, capturing me leaning down to lift my daughter into my arms, the last four digits of the license plate clearly visible.
Madison braced both hands on the table. Her young face glowed with the misplaced zeal of a corporate crusader.
She looked at me as if I were a thief caught in the vault.
“Nate, according to the employee handbook, company vehicles are strictly for business use. As a senior executive, Miss Mercer shouldn’t just be setting an example. She should be the standard. Instead, she’s turned our most expensive client-facing asset into her personal nanny cam on wheels. School runs, grocery trips, weekend errands. It’s all here.”
Her voice was crisp and sharp, echoing off the glass walls.
Then she clicked to the next slide.
It was an Excel spreadsheet.
“I did the math. Between the commute and the school runs, she’s putting an extra twenty-five miles on the odometer every day. Between the fuel consumption of a V12 and the depreciation, we’re looking at thousands in hidden costs every month. And that’s not even counting the driver’s billable hours. She’s stealing from the company.”
I stared at the spreadsheet, then at Madison.
She thought she had found a scandal.
What she had really found was a fuse.