A private investigator. Perfect. He thought I was a hired gun for the old guard.
"I'm not an investigator," I said softly, looking away in shame. "I was a server at that gala, Mr. Sterling. Thirty years ago. I worked for a high-end catering company. One of the wealthy guests... he took a liking to me. He bought me that necklace. He let me pretend, just for one night, that I belonged in that room."
Marcus frowned, his analytical mind trying to find the holes in the story. "A server. And the phone my son saw?"
"It belongs to the man who got me this job," I lied smoothly. "Mr. Harrison. He told me to keep an eye on things. To call him if I saw anything unusual. I just... I wanted to scare your son. He was being so cruel. I didn't call anyone."
Marcus stared at me for a long, suffocating moment. He was a predator deciding if the prey was worth killing. Finally, he laughed—a short, dismissive sound.
"Harrison," Marcus sneered, looking back at Vance. "That old fool is still trying to find a way to stop the campus redevelopment. He actually planted a mole in the cafeteria." Marcus looked back at me, his eyes dead. "Listen to me very carefully, Evelyn. You tell Harrison that his time is up. The old Prescott is dead. The land is being repurposed. And if I ever catch you looking at school documents, or pulling a stunt on my son again, I will make sure you spend the rest of your pathetic life in a state-run nursing home. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir," I whispered, bowing my head.
"Get out of my sight."
I turned and shuffled out of the office. The moment the heavy oak doors clicked shut behind me, my trembling stopped. My posture straightened.
As I walked past the secretary’s desk, Brenda wasn't there. But on her desk, half-hidden under a stack of detention slips, was a thick, rolled-up architectural blueprint. It bore the logo of Sterling Development.
I paused. I glanced down the hallway. Empty.
I reached out and quickly unrolled the edge of the blueprint. It was a schematic for the eastern quadrant of the campus—the exact location of the scholarship dormitories and the historic arts wing. Overlaid on top of the school buildings were crisp, aggressive lines detailing luxury high-rise condominiums.
At the bottom right corner, a stamped date caught my eye. The demolition phase was slated to begin this week.
My chest tightened. That meant the endowment fund wasn't just being slowly siphoned. It was already gone. Marcus had engineered a complete financial collapse of the school to trigger a default, allowing his company to seize the prime real estate.
I let the blueprint snap back into a roll, my pulse pounding a steady, furious rhythm in my ears. I walked out of the building and across the parking lot to my rusty Toyota. I climbed in, locked the doors, and pulled out my encrypted phone.
I dialed Arthur. He answered on the first ring.
"Status, Evelyn?" Arthur's crisp, British-accented voice filled the car.
"Marcus Sterling is accelerating the timeline," I said, staring through the dusty windshield at the school I loved. "He’s preparing to demolish the scholarship wing to break ground on condos. Arthur, I need to know where the endowment money went."
"I've been tracking Sterling's shell companies all afternoon, ever since your silent signal," Arthur replied, the clacking of a keyboard audible in the background. "He's heavily leveraged. He took out massive loans from Vanguard Holdings to finance his other projects, using the school's land as collateral. But to authorize a foreclosure, he needs the school to be completely bankrupt. If he stole the endowment, he transferred it through the school's internal servers to mask it as 'operating losses.'"
"The server room," I murmured. "The digital ledgers are kept on the closed network in the basement of the administrative building. I need to get in there."
"I can grant you remote access if you physically connect a drive to the main terminal," Arthur said. "But Evelyn, if Sterling is moving this fast, he's dangerous. Let me send a security team."
"No," I said firmly. "If a private security team storms the school, Marcus will claim ignorance and delete the files. We need him caught in the act. I’ll go in tonight."
"Understood," Arthur said softly. "By the way, as per your earlier signal, I took the liberty of initiating a minor stress test on Richard Sterling's finances. His primary credit accounts were frozen twenty minutes ago."
A cold smile touched my lips. "Good. Let them feel the pressure."
The next day at school, the tension was palpable. The air in the cafeteria felt heavy, charged with the kind of electricity that precedes a violent storm.
I was wiping down tables near the back when the doors banged open. Richard strode in, looking furious. His designer polo was rumpled, and his face was flushed with anger. Trent and Chase flanked him, struggling to keep up with his aggressive pace.
"I'm telling you, it declined three times!" Richard was shouting at Trent, not caring who heard him. "My black card. Declined at the coffee shop. My dad isn't answering his phone. Someone screwed up the accounts."
He was looking for a target. He was a boy used to absolute control, and the sudden loss of it made him dangerous.