Chapter 3 - FLIGHT OR FIGHT
"I'm not sitting," Claire said, taking a step backward toward the exit. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her daughter's legs. "I'm leaving. You have your paper back. Let us go."
Nathaniel stood up, towering over the boardroom table. He didn't move aggressively, but the sheer force of his presence seemed to block the door. "If you walk out of this room right now, you are in more danger than you can possibly comprehend. Whoever is moving these funds—and based on your reaction to my CFO, I have a strong suspicion who it is—will not let you walk out of this building with that knowledge in your head."
Claire froze. The raw truth of his words hit her like physical blows. For three weeks, she had been piecing together the shredded documents she found in Vance's private executive wastebasket. She had an MBA from Columbia University, a past life that had been destroyed by her ex-husband’s crushing medical debts and subsequent abandonment, leaving her to scrub floors to keep her child fed. She couldn't help but look at the numbers. It was a compulsion. And what she found had terrified her.
"I didn't want this," Claire whispered, a tear finally escaping and cutting a path through the dust on her cheek. "I just wanted to make sure they weren't throwing away anything that could get me in trouble. Then I saw the discrepancies. I wrote them down to try and make sense of it. I was going to throw it away, I swear."
"Mommy's crying," Sophie observed, reaching a sticky, jam-covered hand to pat Claire's face. "Don't cry. The nice man will give us cereal."
Nathaniel looked at the little girl, a strange, unfamiliar tightness blooming in his chest. He had spent his entire life building fortresses—financial, physical, emotional. He let no one in. But looking at this fierce, desperate mother and her fearless child, the fortress walls cracked.
"Nobody is going to hurt you," Nathaniel said, his voice dropping the icy corporate veneer. "But you have to trust me. Did you keep the original shredded documents?"
Claire hesitated, weighing her options. Fired and broke, or dead. She nodded slowly. "They're taped together in a shoebox under my bed in Queens."
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Nathaniel pulled his phone from his pocket and hit a single speed-dial button. "Marcus. Bring the car around to the private subterranean exit. Cancel my afternoon slate. We are going for a ride." He hung up and looked at Claire. "We are going to your apartment. We are getting that box. And then, you're going to tell me exactly how my own executives are trying to rob me blind."
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