Page 99 of Make Them Cry
Gage groans. “Don’t remind me.”
“It could be a good chance,” I say, thinking it through. “To observe. To bait.”
“You sure you want to go?” he asks, brow furrowed.
“I need to. If Tasha’s going to be there, and Andrew, and Helena…”
He flinches at her name. I clock it.
“You think it’s her, don’t you?” I ask quietly.
He hesitates. “I think… she’s dangerous. More than she lets on.”
I think back to Helena’s perfectly coifed smile. Her hand on Andrew’s arm. Her presence in every room I’ve felt most unsafe in.
“She’s always hated me,” I admit. “I never understood why. She was cold… calculating. I thought it was just me projecting.”
“It’s not,” he says. “There’s something else, too.”
“What?”
He shifts. “We’ve been digging into Cathedral’s admin chain. Regent… is good. Invisible. But not perfect.”
I blink. “You found something?”
“Breadcrumbs,” he says, echoing the word we’ve thrown around lately. “But one of them led to a restricted account. An employee who doesn’t officially exist. And guess who has access to every internal HR credential in the system?”
“Helena.”
He nods.
My heart thunders.
“And Andrew?” I ask.
Gage looks at me. “I don’t think he’s clean either. But I think he’s being used. Manipulated. Maybe Helena’s got something on him. I’d bet my company badge on it.”
I finish my coffee, hands trembling slightly.
“I have something on my laptop,” I murmur. “Or at least… I think I do. Files from a backup. Things I forgot I even copied over. There was a project, years ago—one of our coworkers died. I remember the HR announcement was weird. Short. Cold. Like a template was used.”
Gage’s head snaps up. “What was the employee’s name?”
“Shawn Presley,” I say slowly. “He was in dev, like me. Talented. But he was about to go public with something—I think it was about the pay discrepancies. Then he just… didn’t show up. They said he died in a car accident. But nobody talked about it.”
Gage swears under his breath. “Arrow mentioned that name. We flagged it when we were searching for people who had filed internal complaints tied to Regent’s known aliases.”
“Wait—Shawn filed something?” I ask.
Gage nods. “It was sealed. Probably buried by HR. But if you have a local copy, River…”
“Then Helena wants me quiet,” I finish for him.
He nods, jaw tight.
And suddenly it all makes sense.
The escalation. The stalking. The smear campaigns. The images. The deepfakes.
