Chapter 4 - The Midnight Safe
Justin caught up to me in the parking garage, the cold rain washing over us as we stood beside my SUV. He looked completely broken, his hands shaking as he tried to light a cigarette, his eyes completely hollow.
"Sabrina... what are you going to do?" Justin asked, his voice raw. "What did he mean about the safe in his office?"
I looked at my brother, my heart aching for him. Justin had always been the gentlest of us—the visionary architect who built beautiful structures while leaving the cold, hard financial realities of the business to our father and me. He had trusted Maya implicitly, just as I had once trusted Kenneth.
"Kenneth didn't just have an affair, Justin," I said, putting my hands on his arms. "For the last two years, he's been systematically draining Rollins Global Enterprises from the inside out. He’s been falsifying quarterly earnings reports, funneling money into offshore trusts, and selling our proprietary structural designs to foreign competitors."
Justin stared at me, blinking against the rain. "What? That's... that's corporate treason. That could destroy the entire company!"
"It gets worse," I said, my voice tightening. "Six months ago, when I started noticing minor accounting discrepancies, Kenneth suddenly started pressuring me to see a private fertility specialist he picked out. He insisted I take custom hormone supplements he brought home himself. Three weeks after I started taking them, I suffered a massive internal hemorrhage and was told by his doctor that I would never be able to carry a child."
Justin gasped, his eyes widening in pure horror. "Sabrina... no. You don't think..."
"I don't think, Justin. I know," I said, my voice turning to pure ice. "I had those supplements independently tested at an unlisted lab in California last month. They weren't hormone boosters. They were high-dose synthetic luteal inhibitors—drugs designed to induce systemic reproductive failure."
Justin covered his mouth with his trembling hand, taking a step back in utter disbelief. "My God... he poisoned you? To keep you from having an heir to the family trust?"
"Because under my grandfather's original corporate charter," I explained, "if I die or become permanently incapacitated without producing a biological heir, my fifty-one percent voting share in Rollins Global passes automatically to my husband as sole executor of my estate."
I pulled out my keys and unlocked my car. "Stay here, Justin. Go home, lock your doors, and call our family lawyer, Marcus Vance. Tell him to meet me at the corporate headquarters in forty-five minutes."
"I'm coming with you," Justin said firmly, his eyes suddenly reigniting with a dark, dangerous protective fire. "I'm not letting you go into that building alone."
Thirty minutes later, my SUV pulled into the subterranean executive parking garage beneath the silver glass tower of Rollins Global Enterprises in downtown Denver. The building was dark, silent, and empty, looming thirty stories into the stormy night sky.
We took the private executive elevator directly to the top floor. The doors slid open with a soft chime into the dark, plush foyer of the CEO suite.
I walked directly into Kenneth's corner office. The room smelled of expensive leather, old scotch, and high-end cigars. His polished mahogany desk sat before a panoramic window overlooking the rain-slicked city lights below.
I walked behind his desk, reached into the decorative bronze fountain sitting on the corner, and felt around the water basin until my fingers brushed against a small, magnetic key taped to the underside of the pump.
I pulled it out, then walked over to the wall lined with floor-to-ceiling dark oak paneling.
I pressed the third panel from the left. It clicked open with a quiet mechanical hum, revealing a heavy, steel-alloy digital wall safe set deep into the concrete pillar behind the wood.
My hands didn't shake. I entered the numbers Kenneth had given me in the trauma bay: 12 - 34 - 99 - 7.
I inserted the magnetic key into the center keyhole and turned it to the right.
A heavy mechanical clunk echoed through the silent office as the massive steel door unlocked and swung open.
Inside were four thick, black leather-bound ledgers, three encrypted hardware cryptocurrency wallets, an unlabelled amber glass pill bottle containing white chemical capsules, and a sealed manila envelope stamped with red wax seals bearing the mark of an international medical laboratory in Geneva.
I pulled out the manila envelope, broke the wax seal, and pulled out the top document.
As my eyes scanned the German medical translation across the first page, the blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen.
May you like
The affair was just the tip of the iceberg. The financial embezzlement was just money.
What Kenneth had hidden inside this safe was proof of a cold-blooded, meticulously planned conspiracy that went back five years—a conspiracy that involved not just my health, my family's fortune, and my husband... but the true, terrifying cause of my father's sudden, suspicious death three years ago.
