“It’s worse than that, Sabrina,” Paige warned, leaning in so close I could smell her peppermint tea. “Parsons didn’t just have Maya. He has a highly placed mole operating inside your C-suite right now. Someone feeding him your sealed bidding numbers.”
I returned to headquarters the next morning and unleashed a team of ruthless forensic IT auditors. By noon, they had isolated the infection.
The traitor was Marcus Salinas, our charismatic Senior Director of Marketing—a man Kenneth had personally championed and aggressively recruited two years prior. Marcus had been intentionally sabotaging our competitive proposals, ensuring we lost out on billions in civic contracts, funneling the data straight to Parsons Dynamics.
I cornered Marcus in my office, flanked by private security. When presented with irrefutable server logs and offshore wire traces, his arrogant facade shattered. He wept, confessing everything onto a digital recorder, begging for immunity.
But before Marcus could officially sign his sworn confession for the authorities, the door to my office flew open. My assistant stood there, pale and breathless.
“Ms. Rollins,” she gasped. “It’s your brother. Justin has just been arrested by the FBI.”
I turned on the television screen on my wall. Breaking news banners flashed across the local networks. Federal agents had raided Justin’s garage, allegedly discovering twenty-five million dollars in banded cash hidden inside the spare tire compartment of his truck, alongside forged municipal contracts bearing his forged signature.
It was the exact bounty Raymond Parsons had promised Maya. They were framing my brother to paralyze me.
My private cell phone buzzed. The caller ID was restricted. I answered, pressing the phone to my ear.
“Good afternoon, Sabrina,” Raymond Parsons’s smooth, aristocratic voice purred through the speaker. “I admire your tenacity. But this game is over. Resign as CEO by midnight, transfer your voting shares to my holding company, or your sweet brother will spend the next twenty-five years rotting in federal penitentiary for fraud and embezzlement.”
The line went dead.
At that exact second, a text message chimed on my encrypted work phone. It was from Kenneth.
“I know who bankrolled Raymond Parsons’s takeover attempt. Parsons is just a mercenary. The puppet master paying him off isn’t a competitor. It’s someone sitting at your own family’s Thanksgiving table. Open the attachment.”
I tapped the screen. A scanned document materialized. When my eyes registered the signature authorizing the destruction of my family, the air evaporated from my lungs, and my blood turned to glacial ice.
PART 3: The Bloodline Betrayal
The name glaring back at me from the illuminated screen of my phone was Randall Rollins—my father’s younger brother, my beloved uncle, and the sitting President of our commercial real estate division.
My mind violently rejected the data. Uncle Randall was the emotional anchor of the Rollins family. He was the man who had carved the turkey at every holiday dinner, the man who had carried Justin on his shoulders at the state fair, the man who had patiently taught me how to drive a manual transmission in a rusted pickup truck on our mountain ranch.
Yet, the PDF file Kenneth had provided was devastatingly absolute. It contained meticulously authenticated bank ledgers from a shadowy shell corporation named Apex Capital. The documents chronicled a staggering series of wire transfers—totaling nearly two point five billion dollars—funneled directly into accounts controlled by Raymond Parsons.
Randall hadn’t just betrayed us; he had financed our slaughter.
I immediately commanded my driver to take me to the exclusive physical rehabilitation clinic in downtown Denver where Kenneth was convalescing.
The man sitting in the sterile, white-tiled sunroom was a ghost of the arrogant executive I had married. Kenneth looked frail, his skin sallow, leaning heavily on an aluminum walker. The predatory gleam in his eye had been replaced by the haunted stare of a man who realized he was entirely expendable.
Without a word of greeting, he slid a second, heavy-duty encrypted hard drive across the metal patio table.
