I'm back at the day I get called in for questioning about the missing money. I remember exactly how this goes

The silence in Conference Room 4B stretched so thin I could hear the rain tapping against the double-glazed glass sixty floors above the pavement.

Victoria cleared her throat, a dry, abrasive sound. She pulled off her reading glasses, letting them dangle from the gold chain around her neck, and looked at me with clinical disdain. To Victoria, employees below the executive tier were simply line items—liabilities to be managed, audited, and discarded when the variance exceeded acceptable tolerance.

"David, this is not a philosophical seminar," Victoria said, her tone dripping with corporate ice. "We have a four-point-two-million-dollar gap in the client escrow reconciliation. The Federal Reserve clearinghouse flagged the automated transfer protocol at midnight. The routing originated from your biometric workstation key on floor twenty-two. Do you understand the gravity of what I am telling you?"

"I understand it perfectly, Victoria," I replied. I didn't reach for water. I didn't touch my face. I sat as still as stone, letting the stillness unnerve them.

In my first life, this was the exact moment I had panicked. I had grabbed my laptop, frantically typing terminal commands, trying to prove that I hadn't been in the office at midnight, only to discover that my keycard had supposedly badged through the turnstiles at 11:47 PM. Julian had borrowed my spare lanyard from my gym bag in the company locker room, worn an identical trench coat on the security grain cameras, and walked right past the night guard who barely looked up from his phone.

"Let's bring in the audit team, Victoria," Julian said, his voice dropping into that somber, sorrowful timbre he used when he was about to gut an associate. He placed both hands flat on the table, shaking his head with theatrical regret. "David is family. He's been my right hand for seven years. I want to give him every opportunity to explain how this catastrophic administrative oversight occurred before we notify the regulatory authorities."

Administrative oversight.

It was the bait. He wanted me to call it a mistake. He wanted me to claim confusion, exhaustion, a miskeyed entry—anything that would establish that my hands were on the wheel when the bus drove off the cliff. Once an analyst admitted to a procedural error involving seven figures, the criminal intent was trivial for a federal prosecutor to manufacture.

The frosted glass door clicked open behind me.

Two men stepped into the room.

The first was Marcus Reynolds, the firm’s head of internal corporate security—a retired Chicago police lieutenant with broad, sloping shoulders, a flat nose, and eyes that had seen thirty years of back-alley deals and boardroom executions. Behind him stood a younger man in a tailored navy suit with an FBI lapel pin: Assistant United States Attorney Thomas Vance.

My chest tightened, a ghost of memory screaming in my ears. Vance was Julian's second cousin through marriage, a rising star in the Northern District who was hungry for high-profile white-collar indictments to fuel a run for county prosecutor.

"Mr. Mercer," Reynolds said, his voice a gravelly rumble. He didn't offer a handshake. He pulled out a folding chair near the door, setting it down with an intentional, metallic clatter. "We're going to need your phone, your firm-issued laptop, and your security clearance badge."

Julian looked down at his yellow legal pad, pressing his lips into a thin, solemn line. He looked like a grieving father forced to witness an execution.

"Thomas, Marcus... please," Julian said softly, raising a placating palm. "Let's keep this professional. David is cooperating. We’re just trying to trace where the funds landed so we can execute an emergency clawback before the markets open in New York."

"The funds landed in an account registered to Apex Horizon Ltd. at the Bank of Valletta in Malta, Julian," I said, my voice cutting through the room with razor-sharp clarity.

Julian froze.

The gold Montblanc pen slipped from his fingers, rolling three inches across the yellow pad before coming to a stop against the leather blotter.

Reynolds stopped in mid-stride. AUSA Vance, who had been leaning against the credenza with an air of casual, bureaucratic superiority, snapped his head toward me, his brow furrowing.

"How do you know the destination bank, Mercer?" Vance asked, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "The preliminary wire report only generated the primary domestic clearing transit number ten minutes ago. Internal audit hasn't even received the SWIFT confirmation yet."

Victoria looked up, startled. "David, did you authorize that wire?"

Julian didn't look startled. Behind his mask of sorrow, a dark, venomous flicker ignited in his hazel eyes. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the petrified wood table, his voice dropping into a register that was barely louder than a whisper.

"David," Julian murmured, his tone laced with false, suffocating tenderness. "If you moved those funds to an offshore holding to execute a private yield arbitrage... if you thought you could roll the dice on a four-day swap and put the principal back before the quarterly close... you need to tell Thomas right now. The Department of Justice can offer leniency for full restitution. But you have to stop lying to us."

There it was.

The exact trap. The exact words he had used four years ago to put me in an eighty-square-foot cell.

I looked across the table at the man who had been my friend, the man who had held my daughter at her baptism, the man who had orchestrated my slow, public murder without losing a single night of sleep.