Page 85 of Alpha-Ex Wedding Ruse
This meeting would be no different. They’d want breakdowns—projections, forecasts, year-over-year profit growth. They’d want to know if I could double their returns from last year. If I still deserved this seat.
And yet, instead of being locked in on that, I was stuck replaying the sound of Leila telling me she had dinner plans. With Victor.
The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to drive to his place, grab him by the collar, and knock some fucking sense into him.
Charles handed me a folder as the elevator ascended. “I was reviewing the latest expense breakdowns, just cross-checking the numbers—and something’s off.”
I flipped it open. There was too much red.
“Inflated operating costs in two departments,” he said. “Marketing and logistics. It’s not just budget creep. It looks intentional.”
I frowned, scanning the figures. “How bad?”
“Bad. We’re bleeding funds into ghost vendors. Empty companies set up to look legitimate—on paper, they’re contractors, but in reality, they’re just pulling cash out of our budget with no deliverables.”
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. We stepped out.
I kept flipping through the report as we walked. Every payment Charles highlighted led to a dead end—no service invoices, no physical addresses, no deliverables logged. Just payouts.
Clean on the surface. Dirty underneath.
“Someone’s siphoning money.”
Charles nodded. “My guess? A shell operation.”
“And Legal didn’t catch it?”
“If it was buried well enough in the logistics budget, they wouldn’t have seen it unless they were looking.”
I exhaled, jaw tight.
Three days before the board meeting. Of course this would happen now.
“How long?” I asked.
“At least two quarters,” Charles replied. “Maybe more. It was subtle at first. But someone got greedy.”
We reached my office. I tossed the file onto my desk and leaned against its edge, jaw clenched.
“Where was Finance?” I asked. And by Finance, I meant Victor. The CFO. An incompetent one—I always knew—but this? This was beyond negligence. This was calculated.
“Same question I asked myself,” Charles said, folding his arms. “That’s why I double-checked. Victor signed off on every single vendor authorization. Every. Single. One.”
My jaw flexed. “How the hell did this pass the internal audit?”
“He bypassed protocol. Used those emergency override permissions we grant executives during end-of-quarter crunch time. Created fake urgency. Slipped it all through before anyone had time to question it.”
My gaze slid back to the open folder on my desk. Line after line of bleeding red. This wasn’t just mismanagement. It was an orchestrated bleed-out—designed by someone who knew the system inside out. Someone who knew just how far to push without snapping the line. A perfect fraud in broad daylight.
Victor wasn’t just a snake—he’d evolved into a python.
And Leila…how the hell does she not see him for what he is? She looks at me like I’m the villain—holds me accountable for every breath I take—but she wants to go out with the actual villain. I get crucified, and he gets dinner.
My hands curled into fists, knuckles straining against the edge of the desk.
This wasn’t just incompetence anymore. This looked like sabotage. And if the board saw this before we cleaned it up, they’d tear me apart.
“We need to act. Now. Before this gets to the board,” I said, “we do a controlled audit. Quiet. Get an external forensic accountant if we have to. Scrub the books. We fix this before that meeting.”
