Page 15 of Indecent Demands

The idea of her stealing, or possibly being a patsy for someone else’s thievery, angered me to no end. I didn’t want to believe it. There had to be another explanation.

That’s just your dick talking.Ariana was pretty, and I liked her, but that didn’t mean it was impossible for her to be a thief. People—even otherwise good people—were tempted into stealing all the damn time.

I also couldn’t allow myself to jump to conclusions. I pulled up her file and began to do research on her.

Turned out that Ariana had gone to MIT, graduated top of her class, but her financial records also showed a mountain of student loan debt. It had been all paid off years ago, though, so that wasn’t why she was stealing if that was in fact what she was doing.

Then I found the obituaries.

It listed her mother as having passed away from complications due to injuries sustained in a car crash. The death came a couple of years after the crash—meanwhile her father’s death was around the same time but due to cancer. While he’d undergone chemotherapy, it hadn’t been enough to slow the steady march of the cancer through his body.

Both of them had struggled to pay for their care and had run up massive medical debts. Once again, Ariana had found herself in debt, taking on loans in order to pay for her parents’ care. But then, she also had paid off all those loans a few years ago. I didn’t understand. She had no reason to need money, so why would she be skimming or helping someone else to do so?

I braced my elbows on the table and rubbed my temples. I had to find out who was stealing from the company and I really didn’t want it to be Ariana. But whoever it was I needed some damn proof. I couldn’t come to Damien Harcourt and say that I’d found evidence of stealing but not the actual perpetrator.

The answer was somewhere in the computer code. It always was. No matter how much the bugs in the codes drove me insane, no matter how much someone might erase the evidence, the truth was somewhere in there and I was going to find it.

I pulled up the transactions again and compared them with the reports from the accounting department. Yes, there were the automatic changes from the program that had been installed by the hacker. It had done a good job—the program, that is—because it hadn’t worked on a set dollar amount. Instead, it had worked based on percentages, claiming a one or two percent change in the numbers. That made it harder to track and seemed like purchases were just more expensive.

That was interesting, actually. The dollar amounts that the program had been taking off and siphoning were rather small. Not the kind I’d expect someone to take if they were trying to rip off a multi-billion-dollar company. People stole hundreds of thousands and sent it to the Caymans or Switzerland as fast as they could and then lived high off the hog with it. This was much smaller amounts.

Would the thief really be so patient? Waiting for such small amounts to accumulate? A person couldn’t really live the high life on this. It was such a huge risk for so little reward. Why bother stealing at all?

I tried to track down where the money was going to. Without the hard drive showing the program, it was going to be difficult. But maybe…

I switched over to the cryptocurrency system and took a look, trying to find anything—and there, sure enough, was an account registered as a customer of the company who had the same amounts being debited in that were the percentages added to the expense accounts in the reports.

Well, then it probably wasn’t Ariana. She had to know that this would be tracked. This person, whoever they were… I was guessing now that they were trying to blame Brian, their close co-worker, and my money was on it being the other so-called ‘friend’ and former frat brother of Damien—

Huh.

I could see the withdrawals from the cryptocurrency account, and they were all going through a PayPal account, which converted the cryptocurrency to cash to then be sent to—to pay various medical debts?

That wasn’t what I’d expected. But that was what all the PayPal payments showed. All of the money was going into the account as crypto and coming out of it as a debit to completely pay off the Go Fund Me and other fundraising campaigns of people in desperate need of payments for medical reasons. There were also once-a-month payments made to a company that bought up people’s medical debt at an insanely low price and forgave them.

As I registered what I was seeing, my jaw nearly dropped.Holy shit.

This person wasn’t stealing money for themselves. They were stealing money to save people’s lives. This was a modern-day Robin Hood. Robbing the obscenely rich company to save the lives of the poor.

The only problem was that this was still illegal.

I sat back in my chair, frowning at the screen of my laptop. The crypto had been to prove that itwasn’tAriana, since she’d be too smart to use that. But now that I saw where the money was actually going, I could see why it might actually be her after all. The crypto was practically irreversible. Once it went into the PayPal account, it would be impossible to reverse the transactions. Ariana would know that, which meant that even if she was caught, there was no way to get the money back into the original hands—and that was on top of what murky legal waters crypto was in.

I couldn’t see any of these executives going through all this trouble just to donate to charity. They were paid enough and if they donated openly they could get a lot of positive attention for themselves and the company. Why would they hide it? No, it had to be someone who didn’t have legal access to a lot of money.

And of all people, Ariana would understand that medical debt could cripple someone. She had found a way to get out of it, probably by working for such high-paying companies like those on her resumé, but others couldn’t. She’d have sympathy.

I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want it to be true. I was obligated to do something if she was the thief.

I placed a call to our company again to see if our team had found anything on anyone else that might come in handy. Surely Ariana wasn’t the only bleeding heart in the company. Maybe a department manager or another member of the tech team. Tony, perhaps? He was nervous around me and he had plenty of tech know-how. His background check had shown that he had spent a lot of time in his youth volunteering with the local LGBT+ center’s efforts to care for those sick or dying from AIDS. He would understand the painful history of wasting away, unable to pay for medication or expensive care that would make your life comfortable or possibly even suppress your symptoms.

But my gut told me that it was Ariana, and my gut hadn’t been wrong yet.

Fuck.

Our people couldn’t tell me anything new. Lots of personal details, but… nothing that pinged my radar.

I wasn’t going to just accuse her, though. Not without actual evidence. All I had was the proof that someone had hacked into the system and set up a program that would automatically steal money from the company and claim that the money was going into sales, with the money actually going into a crypto account within the company where it was then used to convert into cash and pay for people’s medical expenses. I didn’t actually have proof thatArianahad done any of this.

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