Chapter 6 - The Ultimatum"Sofía, honey, I'm so sorry to keep you waiting," my mother said, rushing over to the table, her face glowing with the warmth of a mother who had finally built a secure life for her child. But the moment she looked at my face, her smile vanished. "Sofía? What's wrong? You're as white as a sheet."
"Mom... a lady was just here," I blurted out, my hands trembling as I pointed toward the empty connecting door.
My mother froze. Her professional instincts—honed by years in federal fraud investigation and corporate defense—snapped into high gear instantly. She didn't waste a second asking questions; she strode swiftly across the room, checked the lock on the connecting door, and then turned back to the desk.
That was when she saw it.
Sitting right on top of the confidential audit files was the heavy silver flash drive, accompanied by a small, black-bordered business card with no name—only a single embossed logo: a golden serpent biting its own tail.
My mother picked up the card, her fingers turning ice-cold. Beneath the logo, handwritten in sharp, elegant cursive, were three words:
Drop the audit. Or lose her.
"Mom..." I whispered, tears welling up in my eyes. "She said... she said the next hospital bill would be for me."
For a terrifying second, my mother looked like she was going to collapse. The fierce, unbreakable woman who had stared down Richard Sterling and saved Javier Ortega’s sister looked entirely shattered. The nightmare she had fought so hard to escape had found us again, wrapped in silk and designer perfume.
Then, something shifted in her eyes. The fear dissolved into pure, concentrated rage.
She grabbed her secure desktop phone and slammed her thumb onto the executive speed-dial button.
"Javier," she said into the receiver, her voice dropping into a tone of absolute steel. "Get to my office right now. Someone just breached our private floor."
Ten minutes later, Javier Ortega burst through the main double doors of the office, his suit jacket off, his tie completely undone. Behind him were two armed private security guards.
He took one look at the silver flash drive, read the card, and saw the terror still lingering in my eyes. His face went dark—darker than I had ever seen it.
"Who was it?" Javier demanded, his voice a low, dangerous growl.
"I didn't recognize her," I said, wiping a tear from my cheek. "She had blonde hair in a bun, a gray suit, and she smelled like expensive flowers."
Javier turned slowly to face his head of security. "Pull every CCTV camera feed from the 40th to the 45th floor between 7:15 and 7:35 PM. I want facial recognition running on every single frame. I want to know how anyone bypassed biometric security without an access token."
"Mr. Ortega," my mother interrupted, her voice shaking slightly as she slid the silver flash drive into an anti-static containment envelope. "We don't need the cameras to know who sent her."
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Javier turned back to her, his brow furrowed. "Who?"
"The board of directors," my mother said coldly. "Richard Sterling wasn't operating a rogue side hustle. He was a middle manager taking orders from the majority stakeholders of GlobalTech’s parent company, Vanguard Capital. And if we plug this flash drive into an isolated terminal... we're going to find out that the entire company was built on stolen money."
