18: The Signatures Of Sin
1168 Words
The silence inside the vault was suffocating.
Cold air hung heavy, and the humming servers sounded almost like a heartbeat — mechanical, relentless, unfeeling.
Amara clutched the data drive, her knuckles white. Sebastian stood a few feet away, his face caught between fury and guilt, the light from the screen throwing sharp shadows across his features.
“Say something,” she whispered.
He didn’t.
So she did. “Celeste said your signature’s on the ledgers. That you approved the first transfer — the one that began all of this.”
Still silence.
“Sebastian!” she snapped, her voice echoing off the steel walls. “Tell me she’s lying!”
Finally, he looked at her. His eyes — dark, haunted — told the truth before his mouth could.
“She isn’t.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath her. “No…”
“It wasn’t what you think,” he said quickly. “I didn’t know what the transfer was for — not at first.”
Amara’s heart hammered. “You signed a document you didn’t understand?”
“I was twenty-five, Amara,” he said sharply, voice raw. “Eduardo had just made me head of finance for the medical division. He told me it was a routine authorization — payment for a ‘donor relocation program.’ I believed him. I was stupid. Hungry to prove myself. I didn’t question it.”
Her eyes filled with tears she refused to shed. “And when did you realize it wasn’t routine?”
He hesitated. “When I saw the list of donors.”
“What list?”
He moved toward one of the computers, inserting the data drive. Screens flickered to life — lines of coded names, transaction dates, and medical IDs scrolling fast. He opened a folder marked Archive – 2009.
“Here,” he said, his voice low. “This was the first batch. Twenty donors from rural hospitals. Every one of them ‘relocated’ to a private facility. None came back.”
Amara covered her mouth, horrified. “And you did nothing?”
“I confronted Eduardo,” he said. “He laughed. Told me it was philanthropy in motion — that we were saving lives at any cost. When I threatened to go to the board, he reminded me of my signature.”
“Your silence bought his empire,” she said bitterly.
His face twisted. “My silence saved lives later! When I stayed, I started siphoning data, hiding evidence, moving money off his radar — setting the trap for him. Everything I’ve done since that day has been to destroy what that signature started.”
She shook her head, stepping back. “You justify corruption with strategy. You tell yourself you’re different from him, but you built your own mask — just like he did.”
He took a step closer. “I built a weapon.”
“And you used me to sharpen it!” she shouted. “You think marrying me — the woman he nearly ruined — was some poetic justice? You think that redeems you?”
Pain flashed across his face. “I didn’t marry you for redemption.”
“Then why?” she demanded. “Tell me, Sebastian. What was I to you? A witness you could control? A mirror to make you feel clean?”
He flinched, eyes wet but defiant. “You were the only thing that made me remember I could still feel anything. When I saw what he’d done to you — how Darian tried to take your body like another transaction — I saw Veronica all over again. I couldn’t lose another woman to his cruelty.”
Her tears finally spilled. “You didn’t save me. You just dragged me into your hell.”
He took a shaky breath. “Then help me climb out. Help me finish this.”
Amara’s voice was a whisper. “You don’t climb out of hell, Sebastian. You burn your way through it.”
She turned away, pressing her trembling hands to the console. The data drive blinked steadily, taunting her with its secrets. The files scrolled faster — hundreds of pages, thousands of signatures, so many coded lives.
And there it was — a document stamped APPROVED: S. CRUZ.
Below it, the description: Initial Funding – Donor Extraction Pilot Project.
Her stomach turned. “God.”
Sebastian closed his eyes. “That was the beginning.”
The words broke something inside her. “The beginning of what? Death? Corruption? You built this nightmare, Sebastian.”
“I didn’t build it,” he said hoarsely. “I was the first mistake. Eduardo made sure I could never erase it.”
Amara’s gaze hardened. “And now you expect me to help you erase him.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “Because no one else can.”
She stared at him — the man she’d once thought untouchable, now stripped bare before her. His confession was a wound, but behind it was something deeper: shame, yes, but also desperation. The kind that came from loving something irreparably broken.
Amara turned back to the drive. Her reflection stared back from the black screen — a woman torn between vengeance and mercy.
Slowly, she ejected the device and slipped it into her clutch.
“What are you doing?” Sebastian asked.
“Keeping this,” she said quietly. “Until I decide whether to expose him — or you.”
His voice softened. “Amara, please. We need each other.”
“No,” she said, stepping past him toward the elevator. “You need me. I just need the truth.”
⸻
The elevator ride up was agonizingly slow. Each floor was a heartbeat closer to war.
When the doors opened, Amara walked into the empty corridor of the hotel, the muffled music from the gala leaking through the walls like distant thunder.
Her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number.
She opened it.
You can’t trust him either, darling. The files you found are only half the story.
—C.H.
Her blood ran cold.
She turned, scanning the corridor. No one. Just mirrors and silence.
Another message followed.
Check the archive’s final folder: “Witness 21.” That’s who really started the Lazarus Program.
Amara’s thumb hovered over the phone, trembling.
“Witness 21”… the name meant nothing. But deep down, she knew — if Celeste was still talking, it meant she wasn’t finished.
The doors behind her slid open — Sebastian.
She slipped the phone into her clutch before he could see.
“Amara,” he said, breathless. “Please. Don’t walk away from me.”
She faced him, eyes cold and clear. “You lied about the past, Sebastian. If you want a future, start telling me about Witness 21.”
He froze.
And in that single moment of hesitation — that flicker of guilt — she knew Celeste was right.
There was another truth.
One even Sebastian had buried.
- Writer
