Page 52 of Filthy Rich Daddies
20
COLIN
If you standin the innovation suite at half after three in the afternoon, you can hear six distinct noises layered like tracks in a forgotten EDM song. The HVAC vent above reception, coughing dusty air at exactly fifty-eight decibels every five minutes. The server in rack eight, whose fan bearings squeal just sharp of middle C. The elevator chime in the hallway beyond the glass wall, always one semitone under the fan squeal, like a polite harmony.
I don’t actually mind that sound. The worst ones are personal.
My mechanical keyboard clacking out a dev-null cadenza. My own heartbeat thudding in my sinuses because it’s been twenty-nine hours since sleep. The barely audiblepingof a ledger anomaly script finishing its loop, reporting another duplicate invoice.
This room isn’t supposed to be for finance forensics—it’s meant for VR prototypes and customer-behavior heatmaps—but the lighting is perfect, the air is cold, and the caffeine tap, a nitro cold brew on draft, never runs dry. Plus, the door locks with an RFID token that only four people on Earth possess.
Privacy. It’s a beautiful thing.
The wall-size glass board behind my desk now looks like conspiracy theorist décor. Invoice numbers connected by neon-string marker lines, shell companies in red, POboxes in purple, date stamps in acid green. At the center of a circle in black:Marcus Burgh?The question mark’s tail twitches like a snake I can’t decide whether to befriend or throttle.
I might have had too much caffeine, but I’ll never admit to it.
I plunge back into the data lake. A fresh SQL query ripples across the screen. Results populate—fourteen vendor IDs, each ringing up four to twelve payments spaced exactly fourteen days apart. Not a pattern born of chance or incompetent staff. This is hand-stitched. I tag each one with a yellow flag.
Next, I pivot to the new “Marietta PO Box” clusters. Every shell entity leads back to the same rented mailbox store, suite number conveniently rotating every quarter. I don’t want to believe that he did this, but the evidence screams, and I can’t deny the thrill of puzzle-solving shooting up my spine.
I haven’t felt this clean-burn focus since my teenage hackathons—the ones that got me banned from three ISP forums and recruited to pen-test for the NSA in the same week. The trick back then was forgetting the real-world stakes, becoming pure logic. Now I’m slicing through my own company’s arteries. But we have to stop the hemorrhaging somehow.
The door hisses. I barely notice until a physical presence eclipses the twin monitors’ glow. Dean. His suit jacket hangs open, tie loosened, posture exuding false ease. But I grew up reading his micro-tells—the reddened earlobes, throat bob on swallow, eyes shining brighter than the LEDs.
Something seismic happened. Something good.
He leans against my desk, arms crossed. “You know the sun exists, right?”
I blink, glance at ribbon windows—nighttime reflection stares back. “That sounds like a threat.”
“You look like hell,” he says, but there’s fondness. He sweeps his gaze over my yarn-board. “Marcus?”
“More invoices than flies on roadkill.” I rotate the screen so he can peek. He whistles low. I rub my face; five o’clock shadow feels like Velcro. “Haven’t touched bottom yet.”
Dean taps his phone. “Tic’s pulling an external audit. We’ll nuke Marcus legally, if we have to.”
Dean’s cedar cologne mixes with ozone from monitors, and the combo triggers a memory. Thalassa in the blanket fort, her hazel eyes flicking between us, asking if we’d stay.
Hazel, not green. Every time someone calls her eyes green I want to correct them with a slide deck explaining how flecks of gold shift her irises to river-stone brown in low light. Hazel is the right word—dynamic, unpredictable, like sunlight in a bottle. I wonder which shade Dean saw when?—
Dean’s voice slices memory. “Coffee count?”
I glance at empty paper cups marching in line across the desk. “Eleven? Thirty-two? Not sure.”
He frowns. “Burgers. Ten minutes.”
He leaves before I can protest. My stomach growls, noticing its emptiness for the first time since…yesterday? I dunno. Numbersblur. I shake my wrist. Sixteen thousand steps today, zero meals. Don’t need meals. Need answers.
As the script loops again, my eyes glaze into a retro color palette—me at sixteen in the basement, DOS prompt blinking next to a half-eaten Pop-Tart, parents upstairs throwing a charity gala while I hit up servers in Romania just to see if I could.
Online, no one gave a flip about stock portfolios or trust funds. They only cared that I could reverse engineer a proprietary protocol or escalate root privileges. In that field, money was mere bits sliding across wire, and I could nudge those bits like wind nudges leaves. I mimicked flight, weightless. Part of me has missed that more than I admit—even to Dean and Tic.
This embezzlement trace scratches that itch. I’m the wraith again. Only now the stakes are internal. Family legacy, maybe a baby’s college fund. That last thought yanks my breath.
Thalassa’s baby—our baby—is floating invisible, potential energy. That notion charges my blood with neon static. I try to dump it by scanning logs faster.
It doesn’t work.
