Chapter 5 - Blood and Ledgers"Explain," I demanded, stepping closer to her.
"My father was Marcus’s older brother, David," June said, her eyes flashing with a cold fury that matched my own. "Marcus pushed him out of the family real estate firm back in the nineties, seized control of our ancestral assets, and left my parents destitute. When my father died of a stress-induced stroke, Marcus promised to pay for my college education and my children's healthcare. Instead, he forced me into his domestic staffing pipeline under an assumed surname, stripped my wages to pay off his gambling debts in underground Chicago clubs, and kept me trapped in poverty so I could never afford a lawyer to challenge his corporate inheritance fraud."
She tossed the flash drive onto the cot beside the wrench.
"Last night wasn't an accident, Mr. Blackwell," June confessed, her voice steady. "I knew you couldn't sleep. I left the pantry door cracked on purpose. I needed the most ruthless man in Chicago to look down at his own kitchen floor and see the rot eating through the baseboards of his empire."
The brilliance of her plan staggered me. She hadn't been a victim of circumstance; she had been a calculated landmine planted right under Marcus’s feet, waiting for the exact moment I walked by.
"If Marcus has the board under emergency clause 4-B, locking me down won't stop the buyout vote," I said, running a hand through my hair. "By noon, he’ll formally strip my voting shares and dissolve Blackwell Holdings into his proxy shell."
"Not if we use his own surveillance network against him," June said, pulling a cracked tablet from her pocket. "While Marcus is hosting the emergency board meeting on the forty-second floor, he’s broadcasting the proceedings live to all executive terminals to intimidate the remaining shareholders. But he forgot one thing."
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"What's that?"
"My uncle always loved watching his victims squirm in high definition," she smiled grimly, tapping the screen. "And he left the backdoor encryption key active on the master media server. If we plug this drive into the sub-level communications relay, we can override every screen in the Blackwell Tower boardroom simultaneously."
