Chapter 5 - The Audit
At midnight, after tucking Nora into the massive bed with a barrier of plush pillows around her, I walked down to the security wing in the basement.
Marcus was waiting for me outside the server room, two thick black binders in his hands.
"Harland is still in the holding room, boss," Marcus said, handing me the binders. "He’s been whining about calling his lawyer every twenty minutes. But while he was crying, our IT team cracked his encrypted personal drive on the estate network."
I took the binders, flipping open the first page. "What did you find?"
"It’s bad, Mr. Luca," Marcus said, his voice grim. "Harland hasn't just been abusing the staff. He’s been running a massive kickback scheme for the last three years."
I scanned the ledger pages. Harland had been systematically falsifying maintenance contracts, inflating the costs of estate supplies, and skimming millions of dollars from my personal operating accounts. But that wasn't the worst part.
"Look at page forty-two," Marcus instructed quietly.
I turned to page forty-two. My blood ran completely cold.
Harland had been pocketing the health insurance premiums that were supposed to cover the domestic staff. For three years, he had been generating fake insurance policy certificates and handing them to Elena, Mrs. Gable, and the groundskeepers, while keeping the actual cash for himself.
When Elena had gone to the community clinic two weeks ago feeling sick, her insurance card had been rejected. She had been terrified to tell me, believing Harland’s threat that asking for medical aid would result in her immediate termination and eviction from the estate.
"He starved them of medical care so he could buy a condo in Miami," I said, my voice dropping into a deadly whisper.
"That's not all," Marcus added, pulling a tablet from his coat. "We pulled the internal security camera feeds from the staff wing over the last six months. Harland deleted the footage from the main server, but our backup drive caught everything."
Marcus pressed play on a video file.
The black-and-white footage showed the cold staff corridor two months ago. It showed Harland cornering Elena near the linen closet, aggressively shaking his finger in her face, tossing a stack of heavy blankets onto the floor, and kicking her laundry bucket over. It showed little Nora watching from behind a door frame, clutching a stuffed bear, trembling with fear.
A cold, lethal silence settled over the server room.
The man I had trusted to run my home had turned it into his own personal feudal kingdom, exploiting the most vulnerable people under my roof while I was away negotiating billion-dollar corporate deals across the globe.
I closed the binder with a heavy, final thud.
"Where is he?" I asked Marcus.
May you like
"Holding room three," Marcus replied.
"Open the door," I commanded. "And turn off the cameras inside the room."
