“Did you sign it?” Elias asked.
“No. I’m done waiting,” I said. “Call the legal team. Tell them to trigger the hostile takeover protocols at midnight tonight. By the time Arthur walks into that board meeting tomorrow, I want every asset he owns frozen. I want his company locked.”
Elias pulled a tablet from the passenger seat and handed it back to me. His face was grave.
“I don't think you should wait until midnight,” Elias said. “While you were in there, I ran the security footage from the school’s external cameras, just like you asked. I tracked Cameron’s movements for the thirty minutes before he hit you.”
I looked at the tablet screen.
“Cameron didn't drift his car to scare you away from the trash, Mrs. Vance,” Elias said quietly. “He drifted to stop you from turning down the north corridor. Look.”
Elias tapped the screen. The video showed Cameron, Mason, and Dylan standing outside the school’s external server room door. Cameron was holding a small silver flash drive. He plugged it into a port on the wall panel.
The silver drive. The one he hid in Mason’s pocket when the headmaster arrived.
“They weren't just skipping class,” Elias said. “They were hacking the school’s mainframe. They injected a payload into the primary server.”
I stared at the screen, the pieces suddenly snapping together in my mind.
“The Ivy League admissions,” I whispered.
CHAPTER 3
The revelation hit me like a physical blow.
I tapped the screen on Elias’s tablet, rewinding the footage. I watched Cameron slide the silver drive into the external maintenance port. I watched Dylan pacing nervously in the background. I watched Mason acting as a lookout.
Then I looked at the timestamp.
It was exactly four minutes before the incident in the parking lot.
“Arthur’s embezzlement is a massive crime,” I said, my voice tight. “But the board could theoretically cover it up if he managed to replace the funds with the real estate deal tomorrow. This, however…” I pointed at the screen. “This is federal fraud.”
“I ran a diagnostic on the school’s network from our end,” Elias said, merging the SUV onto the highway. “Cameron’s payload is a delayed-execution script. It’s designed to alter the official academic transcripts and the upcoming SAT proxy scores stored on the school’s local server before they batch-upload to the universities tomorrow at 8:00 AM.”
“Arthur’s son is failing,” I realized aloud.
I had seen Cameron’s test papers in the trash. He was a miserable student. But Arthur Sterling’s legacy demanded that Cameron attend Yale. Arthur couldn't buy his way in legally anymore—the scrutiny was too high. So Cameron was stealing the spots. He was artificially inflating his own scores, and likely Mason’s, while suppressing the scores of legitimate scholarship students to maintain the school’s average.
Just like they had suppressed Leo.
A cold fury settled into my bones, freezing out the pain in my knee.
“If the batch upload happens tomorrow at 8:00 AM,” I said, looking up at Elias in the rearview mirror, “then the evidence of the hack is currently sitting on the physical server drive inside the school.”
“Yes,” Elias confirmed. “But there’s a problem. Headmaster Davis has an automated twenty-four-hour overwrite protocol on the security logs. It wipes the physical server every night at 2:00 AM to hide his own financial tracks. Once that wipe happens, Cameron’s payload will be integrated as native data, and the evidence of the breach will vanish.”
I checked the clock on the dashboard. It was 11:30 PM.
“Turn the car around,” I ordered.
“Mrs. Vance, we already have the financial documents to ruin Arthur—”
“It’s not enough to ruin Arthur financially,” I snapped, my voice cracking with the heavy weight of three years of suppressed grief. “Arthur bought his way out when his son drove my grandson into a wall. If I only expose the money, Arthur goes to a white-collar resort prison and Cameron inherits whatever is left in trust. Cameron walks away. Again.”