Page 81 of Filthy Rich Daddies
“Not long ago, I was living on boxed soup and scraping together money for the bus. Now I’m here. With you guys. Drinking coffee that tastes like roasted unicorn.”
“You’re welcome.”
I roll my eyes, but I smile. Then there’s a knock.
A young woman in business casual peeks in. “The board is on their way up.”
Dean sits straighter. Tic’s head tilts just slightly. Colin’s grin sharpens.
“Oh boy,” I mutter.
The door barely clicks shut before the room explodes.
Not literally, but it feels like it. Fifteen—no, sixteen—men barrel in, all at once, like someone tipped over a can of grumpy board members. They talk over each other, shake hands with no one, and take seats without waiting to be offered them. Tension whips through the room like a live wire.
One of them glares at Colin. “What is this? We weren’t told there’d be an audience.”
I glance down at my coffee and pretend not to exist.
“She’s not the audience,” Colin says mildly. “She’s a witness.”
That gets a few huffs and mutters.
An old man walks in last. Marcus. Has to be. He’s got the fake grandfatherly smile thing going again, the one that probably convinced a million-dollar donor to trust him back in the eighties. Today, it looks brittle. He straightens his tie and takes the seat at the head of the table like nothing’s wrong.
“Gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s begin.”
Colin doesn’t sit. He stays standing behind his desk, which makes him look taller, more in control. He taps a button on a console I didn’t know was there, and the screen on the far wall lights up.
“We have some things to discuss,” he says. “And I’d like to skip the part where we pretend we’re still confused.”
The board quiets.
Colin clicks something, and the screen splits into several windows. Bank statements, emails, transfer logs, and a familiar-looking line graph that dips sharply—presumably the moment the servers crashed.
“Over the last six months, several accounts tied to Copeland’s operational budgets have been quietly siphoning money overseas,” Colin says. “Specifically, into accounts under shell corporations based in the Cayman Islands and Belize. All of them trace back to one name.”
He clicks again. A single line of text appears:Marcus Burgh.
Gasps. Real ones. Like we’re in a telenovela and someone just confessed to being the evil twin.
Marcus’s smile falters for the briefest second. “Now, I know this looks dramatic?—”
Tic cuts in. “That’s because it is.”
Colin continues, calm and clinical. “We also discovered traces of those same accounts interacting with the dark web just days before the breach. Payment trails. Encrypted messages. A payout to a known leak broker.”
Dean steps in now, finally rising from his seat. “In layman’s terms, Marcus leaked our customer data to generate panic—then used that panic to manipulate internal decisions, push us out of leadership, and redirect financial control to syphon more money into his offshore accounts. Also, because he’s wanted the CEO chair since he came here.”
Marcus laughs, sharp and humorless. “That’s outrageous. You expect us to believe I would compromise this company for a power grab?”
“Yes,” Tic says simply.
And then, like a magician revealing the final card, Colin clicks one last file.
A video begins to play.
It’s security footage—low-res, timestamped—of Marcus standing in a locked server room, swiping a keycard, tapping on a laptop. There’s no sound, but the visuals say enough.
