Chapter 7 - THE STOLEN LEDGER AND THE WHISPER OF BETRAYAL
The shadows inside the Manhattan penthouse lengthened as afternoon turned into a tense, stormy twilight.
Arthur sat alone in the leather armchair near the fireplace, thumbing through a leather-bound journal that belonged to Nico’s late father—a artifact of a bygone era when honor still mattered in the underworld.
His mind drifted back to the night I walked out, remembering the exact moment Nico dismissed my existence with a casual sentence of casual cruelty.
Arthur had spent the last seven days quietly conducting his own private investigation, not to drag me back to the cage, but to understand what deep rot was infecting their inner circle.
He unlocked a private compartment in Nico’s filing cabinet using a spare key he had kept for years, looking for financial records related to Salvatore’s sudden aggression.
Instead of shipping invoices, his fingers brushed against a hidden folder labeled with a string of numbers that corresponded to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.
Opening the folder, Arthur’s breath caught in his throat as he scanned pages of detailed bank transfers that proved someone high up in Nico’s organization was actively embezzling funds.
Worse still, the records showed that the mole had been leaking sensitive cargo routes to Salvatore for the past six months—precisely during the period when Nico had been ignoring business to focus on his own paranoia.
Arthur realized with sickening clarity that while Nico was wasting millions tracking a woman who wanted nothing to do with him, his own empire was being hollowed out from the inside.
The mole wasn't me; the mole was Marcus, the very head of security who stood by Nico’s side every day pretending to hunt for my whereabouts.
Arthur closed the folder with a sharp snap, his heart pounding against his ribs as he weighed the dangerous choices before him.
If he told Nico immediately while my disappearance still consumed his every waking thought, Nico would likely execute Marcus in a blind rage without securing the stolen assets first.
If he stayed silent, the syndicate would collapse within a month, dragging everyone down into the bloody wreckage of a civil war.
Arthur stood up, sliding the incriminating documents inside his tailored wool coat just as heavy footsteps echoed down the private hallway.
Nico pushed open the study door, looking exhausted and disheveled, demanding to know if any new reports had come in from the Queens operatives.
Arthur looked straight into Nico’s bloodshot eyes and lied smoothly, saying that the search teams were still combing the outer boroughs without any definitive results.
Nico cursed violently, kicking a heavy mahogany chair across the room and shouting that my ingratitude was an insult to everything he had built.
Arthur listened to the pathetic rant in absolute silence, feeling a wave of profound pity for the man who thought he was a king while wearing a crown made of glass.
He realized then that I had been the only thing keeping Nico’s humanity intact, and by casting me aside like broken furniture, he had invited his own destruction.
Leaving the penthouse without another word, Arthur stepped out into the freezing rain and made a quiet phone call to a trusted, retired detective he knew from his early days on the police force.
He didn't ask the detective to find me to bring me back to Nico; he asked him to verify my current safety in Queens, driven by a quiet, protective instinct that Nico had long since lost.
The detective’s voice crackled over the secure line a few hours later, confirming that a young woman matching my description was living quietly above a bakery in Astoria and working at a local diner.
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Arthur exhaled a long breath of relief into the rainy night air, whispering a silent wish that I would stay as far away from the impending war as humanly possible.
He knew that when the truth about Marcus and the stolen millions finally exploded, the glass tower would come crashing down into a mountain of ash and blood.
