Jonathan Cross sat at a small stainless-steel table in the interview booth, wearing an orange jumpsuit that hung loosely on his frame. The confident, charismatic CEO who had commanded the stage just hours earlier was completely gone. His hair was disheveled, his shoulders slumped, and his eyes bloodshot.
When the heavy metal door clicked open and I stepped into the booth, Jonathan looked up. A bitter, defeated laugh escaped his lips.
"Come to gloat, Karen?" he rasped, staring down at the bolted table. "I suppose you've already locked down my bank accounts, my apartment, and my voting shares."
"Your accounts are frozen, your shares have been forfeited to the board under emergency forfeiture clauses, and your uncle Thomas's legacy is currently being unraveled by federal investigators," I said calmly, taking a seat on the opposite side of the steel table.
Jonathan flinched at the mention of his uncle. He pressed his palms against his face, rubbing his temples hard. "Uncle Thomas warned me about you years ago," he muttered through his fingers. "He said you were too smart for your own good—that the moment you walked into that Chicago hangar twelve years ago, you saw things you shouldn't have seen."
"I saw a corrupt executive framing an innocent employee to cover up inventory embezzlement," I said steadily. "And you spent the next twelve years trying to finish what he started."
Jonathan dropped his hands, looking across the table with a mixture of exhaustion and lingering resentment. "You think you're the hero of this story, don't you? You think you came back and defeated the bad guys. But you don't even know why Jillian was so desperate to help me siphon those funds."
I raised an eyebrow. "Jillian was protecting her business."
"Jillian was paying off my debts," Jonathan corrected bitterly. "My personal debts—gambling losses, bad investments, the whole mess. She’s my sister, Karen. My half-sister. Nobody knew about it because Thomas made us keep it buried to protect the family name."
The revelation hung in the air between us, heavy and unexpected. Jillian Cross wasn't just a opportunistic business partner or a casual accomplice; she was Jonathan's sister, bound to him by blood and a legacy of family secrets that stretched back decades.
"She lied, she forged signatures, and she helped you steal from my company," I said, my voice unwavering. "Family history doesn't excuse federal fraud, Jonathan."
"I'm not asking you to excuse it," Jonathan said quietly, leaning forward across the steel table. "I'm telling you because the federal indictment isn't going to stop with me and Jillian. Uncle Thomas left behind a paper trail that reaches deep into the regulatory board of this entire airline industry. If you push this to a public trial, the resulting scandal won't just destroy my family—it will tear Apex Air's stock value apart from the inside out, and you'll go down with the ship right alongside us."
I looked into his eyes, searching for a bluff, but found only the desperate, hollow truth of a man who had nothing left to lose.
Before I could answer, the heavy metal door swung open behind me. Marcus Vance stepped into the room, holding his phone out with an urgent, grave expression.
The black SUV sped northward on Interstate 10, cutting through the dark desert night toward Scottsdale, Arizona. In the backseat, I stared at the encrypted digital files Marcus had forwarded from the federal search team.
"Explain it to me again, Marcus," I said, my eyes fixed on the glowing screen of my tablet.