Chapter 3 - The Ghost from the Past
The guest house was shrouded in darkness, save for a single sliver of light glowing beneath the front door.
Evelyn didn't knock. She slid her brass key into the deadbolt, turned it with a sharp click, and pushed the heavy wooden door open.
The interior didn't look like a temporary quarters for a part-time janitor.
The walls were covered in whiteboards filled with complex flowcharts, financial tracking algorithms, and corporate hierarchy trees of Hartwell Data Systems. In the center of the room sat a high-end workstation surrounded by multiple monitors displaying real-time server traffic.
And sitting at the desk, calmly spinning a pen between his fingers, was Mason Reed.
He didn't look surprised to see her. He simply swivelled his chair around and watched as Evelyn stepped inside, her eyes wide with shock and betrayal.
“You,” Evelyn breathed, her voice trembling with anger. “You’re not just a janitor.”
“Observant,” Mason said mildly. “Though technically, I am a janitor. The pay stub is real. The hours are brutal. The back pain is entirely genuine.”
“What is all this?” Evelyn demanded, gesturing wildly to the whiteboards covered in her company’s confidential data. “Are you industrial espionage? Did the competitors send you?”
“Sit down, Evelyn,” Mason said, his voice carrying an unexpected authority—the kind of tone that brooked no argument, cutting through her panic like a surgical blade.
Evelyn didn't move. “Explain yourself before I call the federal police.”
“Go ahead. Call them,” Mason replied, leaning back and crossing his legs. “Mention the name David Vance. See how fast federal dispatch transfers your call to an internal federal oversight division.”
Evelyn froze. The name hit her like a physical blow.
David Vance.
The brilliant chief financial officer of a major cyber-security firm who had mysteriously vanished six years ago, taking with him evidence of massive corporate embezzlement—embezzlement that had directly involved Hartwell Data Systems during its early, turbulent startup phase.
“David...” Evelyn whispered, color draining entirely from her face. “You died in a plane crash off the coast of Maine. The authorities closed the case.”
“My plane went down, yes,” Mason said, his dark eyes turning hard and cold, stripping away the gentle facade he had worn around Sophie. “Except I wasn't on it. Someone switched the passenger manifests twenty minutes before takeoff. Someone who needed me out of the picture before the federal audit exposed where the startup capital for Hartwell Data Systems really came from.”
Evelyn staggered backward, her hand catching the edge of a bookshelf to steady herself. “I didn't know anything about illegal funds! My co-founder handled the initial financing before he died! I built this company legally!”
“Your co-founder was clean,” Mason agreed quietly. “But his primary investor—the man who bankrolled your first two million dollars of server infrastructure—was a man named Marcus Vance. My uncle. And your current chief operating officer, Richard Cole, was his bagman.”
The pieces clicked together in Evelyn’s mind with terrifying clarity.
“Richard...” she breathed. “Richard brought you here as the janitor?”
“No,” Mason said, standing up slowly. “I got myself hired here. I spent six months tracking Richard’s money laundering through the estate’s maintenance contracts. I needed access to the master server room. And I needed to know why my uncle was still trying to bleed your company dry from the inside.”
“And Sophie?” Evelyn’s voice cracked, maternal terror overriding her corporate shock. “Why are you getting close to my daughter? What does she have to do with this?”
May you like
Mason’s expression softened, the hard lines of the investigator melting away to reveal the grieving father underneath.
“Nothing,” Mason said softly. “She has nothing to do with corporate greed. But she was drowning, Evelyn. While you were busy building an empire to protect her future, she was starving for a present where someone didn't walk away.”
