Chapter 3
Inside the car, the air was perfectly climate-controlled and faintly scented with leather and cedarwood from the freshener James preferred. It was a sharp contrast to the damp tension still vibrating through the parking garage.
Through the tinted window, I watched Trevor, Brianna, and Lauren standing under the flickering fluorescent lights. Trevor’s face was twisted in disbelief and fury. He actually stepped forward and slapped his palm against the reinforced glass.
“You can’t just leave us here!” he shouted, his voice muffled but desperate. “It’s pouring rain!”
James glanced at me in the rearview mirror. His expression, usually calm and professional, held a flicker of concern.
“Miss Chloe, your arm. Should we stop at urgent care?”
I looked down at the gauze wrapped around my forearm. A small red bloom had already seeped through the white cloth. It hurt, but the cut wasn’t deep.
“No. Just take me home. And lock the doors.”
James shifted into drive.
The engine purred, low and powerful, drowning out whatever Brianna was screaming behind us as we pulled away.
By the time we reached the rain-slicked streets of downtown Seattle, the adrenaline that had been holding me upright evaporated. I leaned my head back against the leather seat and closed my eyes.
“They called me earlier,” James said quietly, keeping his eyes on the road. “About an hour before you did.”
I opened my eyes.
“They claimed you were dropping out of the arrangement because you could no longer afford it. They suggested they take over the route.”
A dry, humorless laugh escaped me.
“They really thought they could steal my driver and my car.”
“I informed them that my services are contracted exclusively,” James replied. “When they continued pushing, I quoted them the standard executive transport rate of two hundred dollars a day. They were not pleased.”
“They’re going to make my life miserable at the office tomorrow,” I murmured, watching neon lights smear across the wet window.
“With respect, Miss Chloe,” James said, his voice taking on a rare paternal tone, “your father built that firm. If you simply told human resources who you are, this would end immediately.”
“No.”
The word came out sharper than I intended.
“If I pull the CEO’s daughter card, they’ll spin it as the spoiled heiress crushing poor working-class employees. They’ve already started planting that idea. Did you hear Brianna today? We’re working people. Every dollar counts. If I fire them using my father’s power, they become martyrs. I want them to hang themselves with their own rope.”
My phone buzzed.
It was a text from my father.
Integrity issues are handled with immediate termination pending HR and legal review. What happened? Are you okay?
I typed back quickly.
I’m fine. Just office politics. Don’t step in yet. I’ll handle it.
My father, Edward Langford, had founded Langford Analytics twenty-five years ago. When I graduated with a degree in data science, I refused to take an executive role. I wanted to start at the bottom as a junior analyst. I wanted to know whether I was actually good at my job, or whether people were just agreeing with me because my surname was on the building.
So I used my middle name.
At work, I was Chloe Bennett.
Only the head of HR and my department director knew I was really Chloe Langford.
To Trevor, Brianna, and Lauren, I was just an overly generous twenty-something with a suspiciously affordable “relative” driving a luxury car.
By the time James turned into the long, winding driveway of my house, a plan had already begun to take shape.
I thanked him, went inside, and immediately opened my personal laptop.
Then I logged into the company’s internal server.
Because of my real clearance level, which I almost never used, I had access to the audit logs for our department’s shared drives. If Trevor, Brianna, and Lauren were willing to lie, manipulate, and physically intimidate me over a discounted car ride, what else were they doing?
I started with Lauren.
She was the weakest link, but in some ways the most dangerous. She played the victim beautifully.
I pulled up the metadata on the five-million-dollar acquisition proposal I had saved for her six months earlier. Then I spent the next four hours cross-referencing her recent projects.
It didn’t take long to find the rot.
Lauren hadn’t simply made one mistake. She had been systematically copying data from old, defunct client reports and pasting it into new predictive models to save time.
It was outright fabrication.
If a client ever audited those numbers, Langford Analytics could be sued into oblivion.
Next, I turned to Trevor.
Trevor was in sales. Aggressive, loud, and endlessly proud of his expense account.
I pulled his reports from the last fiscal quarter.
Dinner at El Gaucho with prospective client — $450.
Lunch at the Metropolitan Grill — $200.
I cross-referenced the dates on those receipts with building key-card records.
Three times, Trevor claimed he was entertaining clients downtown, while his access logs showed him leaving the office garage at five o’clock and getting directly into my carpool.
He had been submitting fake receipts and pocketing the reimbursements.
Finally, I looked at Brianna.
Brianna was our department’s project manager. She controlled the vendor contracts for several software tools. I dug through the invoices and noticed she had recently switched our data visualization software to an obscure startup.
When I checked the startup’s corporate registration, the listed agent was a man named Daniel Pike.
A quick scan of Brianna’s public social media confirmed Daniel Pike was her brother-in-law.
She was funneling company money to her family.
I leaned back in my chair, staring at the glowing screens.
My arm throbbed, but I barely noticed.
My father had been right.
Unconditional kindness didn’t just breed entitlement. It gave parasites camouflage.
Because I had been so eager to be liked, so eager to help, I had accidentally created a pleasant, low-stress environment for three fraudsters to bleed my family’s company dry.
This wasn’t just an integrity issue anymore.
This was embezzlement, fraud, and corporate sabotage.
I compiled every document, every cross-reference, every screenshot, every log into one encrypted file.
I did not send it to HR.
I did not send it to my father.
Instead, I scheduled it to be delivered to the company’s external auditing firm at eight o’clock Monday morning.
Let professionals handle the execution.