Chapter 3 - The Audit on Mulberry Street
With Boyd detained and placed under the strict, inescapable supervision of Rhett’s enforcers, I was brought directly into the inner sanctum of the Malone operations on Mulberry Street. Moving from the grueling antiseptic routine of emergency room nursing to the high-stakes world of syndicate accounting, I was given an office adjacent to Rhett’s private study, tasked with auditing every financial transaction, payroll slip, and housing log linked to the estate over the past decade. It didn’t take long to realize that Boyd Sutter was merely a small-time pawn in a much larger, more dangerous game of corporate espionage. Buried deep within the subsidiary shell companies, I discovered that the information Boyd leaked had been fed to him by an internal traitor—one of Rhett’s senior capos who wanted to orchestrate a hostile takeover. As I worked late into the night beneath the warm glow of desk lamps, leaning on my nursing school discipline to parse through thousands of lines of fraudulent data, Rhett would frequently check in, bringing black coffee and watching me with a steady, intense regard that blurred the line between employer and protector.
