Chapter 14 - The Ghost of the Past
By late afternoon, the legal restructuring of Sterling Logistics was complete. David escorted a hollowed-out Arthur Sterling out of the building, leaving me alone in the vast, quiet sanctuary of my office.
My encrypted phone buzzed on the desk.
Private Alert: Local IP trace.
I tapped the screen, bringing up the security feed from the ground-floor perimeter. Outside the towering glass lobby doors of Veritas Tower, standing in the cold autumn rain, was a figure in a water-logged, cheap gray hoodie.
It took me a second to recognize him.
Weston Prescott.
He looked unrecognizable. The bespoke Italian suits were gone, replaced by thrift-store layers that hung loosely on his frame. His hair was matted with rain, his face gaunt and unshaven. He was holding a crumpled cardboard sign in one hand, staring up at the penthouse windows like a lost, desperate ghost haunting a paradise he could never reenter.
A crowd of pedestrians walked past him, completely ignoring the disgraced CEO who once commanded headlines across the financial world. One businessman bumped into his shoulder, dropping a coffee cup, and snarled at him to watch where he was going. Weston didn't fight back. He just shrank into himself, shivering against the biting wind.
The security guards stepped forward, reaching for their batons to usher the vagrant off the private property.
"Hold," I spoke softly into my desk intercom.
May you like
The guards froze, stepping back into the shadow of the portico.
I stood up from my desk, walking slowly toward the floor-to-ceiling glass window. I looked down from the fiftieth floor, watching the tiny, pathetic figure standing in the rain. He would never see me up here, hidden behind the tinted, bulletproof glass. He would never truly understand how he lost everything—not because of bad luck or a shifting market, but because he spent his entire life looking down at everyone else, never realizing the person holding his leash was the one he treated like dirt.
