Billionaire’s plight

Chapter two. The Quiet start

As I dressed to work this morning I just remember that sometimes life can be so unpredictable. Two years ago I was a cleaner but now I am a staff and it makes me flashback to how the story really happened.

My father, Sir Great, was a forensic accountant, but he didn’t work for big companies. He worked for small business owners who got cheated, and if a partner stole money or a bank made fake charges, he was the one they called to find the missing numbers.

He was good at it, too good, because two years ago he found proof that a real estate company called Orientek was moving money through fake charities to avoid taxes and steal from investors. The CEO of Orientek was James Lee.

My father was supposed to testify in court, but a week before the hearing he died in a car crash. The police said it was an accident and that the brakes failed, but I didn’t believe it because my father checked his car every Sunday and never missed it.

When he died, we lost everything. The court case was dropped because the main witness was gone, and Orientek said my father was a liar who made up numbers. They sued his estate for defamation and took our house, our savings, everything. My mother got sick from stress and died six months later. I was 22, alone, and broke.

James Lee owed my father more than money. He owed him his life and his name. And he owed me answers. That was why I was at that gala two years ago.

I was not a guest. I was not a staff. I was a server in a black uniform that was too big and shoes that hurt my feet. I was not supposed to be there. I had hacked into the event’s guest list because I knew James Lee would be there. My plan was simple: get into the VIP lounge, plug a flash drive into any laptop I could find, copy Orientek’s files, and prove my father was right so I could take it to the police or the news. I needed to clear his name before I went crazy from anger.

That was when I met him.

Dominic Hale.

He was standing on the balcony, away from the crowd, like he owned the whole building. I was walking past with a tray of drinks when he grabbed my wrist.

"You’re not supposed to be here," he whispered, leaning close to my ear while the music played loudly in the background.

"I’m just serving drinks, sir," I had lied, my heart beating so fast I thought it would burst out of my chest.

"A server doesn’t carry a flash drive in her pocket, Ava," he said, and my blood turned to ice because I didn’t even know he knew my name yet.

He had seen me ten minutes earlier. I had slipped into the coatroom, found a laptop with the Orientek logo, and plugged my flash drive in. I was copying their offshore account files when he walked in.

He didn’t call security. He didn’t shout. He just watched me, with a small smile like he was watching a movie he liked. Then he took the flash drive from my hand before I could pull it out.

"You don’t know what you’re doing, little girl," he said. "These people will kill you for less."

He let me leave that night. He kept the flash drive. And I ran away as fast as I could without ever looking back.

I thought my life was over, but I had to keep working to avoid suspicion. So I went back to my real job the next week: I was scrubbing the floors near the VIP lounge of Hale Enterprises.

Hale Enterprises was one of the companies my father had audited before he died, and he told me Dominic Hale was “ruthless but fair” and that he “paid debts.” I didn’t know what that meant then. I needed the cleaning job because it was the only place that paid cash daily and didn’t ask questions.

That was when I overheard two senior directors arguing over a massive deficit in their merger plans. They were staring at a tablet, looking completely lost, so I took a huge risk and spoke up while pointing at a specific row of data. I explained that they were miscalculating the interest rates from the offshore accounts, which was the exact answer they had been searching for all night.

The two men looked at me like I was an alien, but they were so desperate that they actually listened to my explanation. One of them, the Head of Finance, was so impressed that he told me to bring my CV to his office the very next morning.

I showed up in my only good suit, passed their technical test with ease, and was hired on the spot as a junior analyst. Of course, Dominic knew everything because as the CEO, he has to sign off on every new hire in the building.

He didn't stop them from hiring me because he wanted to see if I was really as smart as I seemed that night. For two years, he watched me climb the ladder from a simple clerk to a lead assistant, never saying a word about the flash drive.

He let me build a new life and feel safe, just so he could pull the rug out from under me when he finally needed a favor. Now I realize that my entire career wasn't a fresh start, it was just a long interview for the dangerous job he gave me today.

Sometimes an encounter is all you need to experience a change in your life. It could be a good or bad change, all depending on the level of encounter. As for me, I am about experiencing both.