The “Helpful” Gift From My Assistant Contained a Live Camera—and She Already Knew

By 4:00 AM, my lead legal counsel, Victoria, arrived with three massive binders containing the unredacted filings of Aegis Holdings.

"If we report this to the SEC and the FBI right now," Victoria explained, spreading the documents across the conference table, "Aegis will burn their burner numbers, deny all connection to Chloe, and launch an emergency court injunction to freeze our merger while the federal investigation drags on for years. That’s exactly what Arthur Sterling wants. He doesn't need to win a legal battle—he just needs to stall our deal until our financing line expires at the end of the month."

I stared at the disassembled lamp on my desk. The micro-lens reflected the soft ambient light of the room.

"So we don't report it," I said slowly.

Victoria frowned. "Excuse me?"

"Chloe thinks she’s fighting a righteous war for her father," I continued, turning to Marcus. "And Sterling thinks he’s receiving real-time internal intelligence about our valuation targets. If they think the lamp is still active, we control what they see."

I walked over to the guest suite door and unlocked it. Chloe was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face pale, staring out the window at the breaking dawn.

"Your father's name is Robert Vance," I said as I entered.

Chloe flinched at the sound of her father's name. "Don't talk about him."

"I took a look at the pension records from the Midwest division while you were sitting in here," I said, throwing a tablet onto the bed next to her. "Look at the signature on the liquidation order that stripped the pension guarantees."

She hesitated, then picked up the tablet. As her eyes scanned the official filing from eight months ago, her breath hitched.

The signature at the bottom of the document wasn't mine. It was Arthur Sterling’s signature, executed when Aegis Holdings held the minority management contract for the subsidiary prior to our merger.

"Sterling gutted your father's pension fund four months before my firm acquired the company," I explained coldly. "He used the shorted pension capital to fund his hostile takeover bid for Vance Tech. He made you steal from the man who actually tried to buy out the debt to save those jobs."

Chloe’s eyes filled with sudden, stinging tears as she read the legal audit line by line. "No... no, he told me—"

"He lied to you," I said. "He used your grief to turn you into a fall girl for a federal crime. When the FBI eventually traces that transmitter, the serial number won't point to Aegis. It will point directly to a dummy account registered in your name."