I don’t wait to see what happens next. I’ve seen enough.
..
Leonardo was not lying.
Lorenzo is on a date with another woman. Hours after he made love to me like I was the most precious woman in the world, he agreed to sit across from another woman. I guess it makes sense now why he wouldn’t respond to my texts or answer my calls.
That cruel son of a bitch.
My fingers tremble as I type in a few commands and change his entire order to a mushroom dish. Stuffed mushrooms for appetizers and a side dish of creamy mushroom soup, taking pleasure in knowing how much he hates the smell or taste of anything with mushrooms in it. It's petty but not nearly what he deserves. Maybe later, when my heart isn’t aching, I’ll think of a better way to get back at him.
I bite down the urge to cry as I take a screenshot of him dining with the woman and attach it to a scathing message telling him not to contact me anymore. I click send, and once I see the delivered notice, I block his number and drop my head onto my desk, mourning a love that’s ended before it had a chance to fully bloom.
Damn it.
Damn him!
I push back and brush my hair from my face as I start pacing. The untouched takeout sits on my counter, mocking me. I want to scream, to shatter something—possibly that handsome face of his—anything to release the suffocating pressure inside of me.
Work.
The second the word pops into my head, I realize it might help distract me from the man who just broke my heart. I grabmy laptop and move to the couch, curling up with the files spread around me as I go through them from where we left off last night. I block Lorenzo from my mind as I go through the credentials used to log in to accounts and note down the name that keeps recurring. Except something doesn’t feel right. I grab another file and flip through the pages, and right there is a medical leave letter.
I freeze. Wait, I know that name.
I kneel on my couch as excitement pumps through my veins. I dig through the files littered on my desk until I find what I’m looking for. The name on the medical leave is the same name used to log into the company’s accounts. How was a sick person on leave able to do all this?
“Someone’s lying,” I mutter to myself, refusing to think of yet the other liar I let into my life. I push Lorenzo out of my thoughts as I pull up the hospital’s system on my laptop. It takes me twenty minutes to bypass their security—embarrassingly outdated for a medical facility—and access the patient records. Sure enough, the man on medical leave is indeed admitted there. Has been for three weeks. “How the hell does a sick person have access to accounts and protected documents?” I mumble.
One thing I’ve learned from “interning” at the company is that no one leaves with company property, and everything is kept in a closed network. To access the original files or log into accounts, one would need to be in the building. And yet, here's one document with signatures from a man who's supposed to be in the hospital. And the login credentials point to him being in the office.
Shit, how did we miss this?
Someone has clearly been using the sick man’s identity and login credentials to steal and cover their trail. Using the cops as a distraction. It’s all so clean. So smart.
But I am smarter.
“I’ll find you,” I promise, cracking my knuckles and settling in my chair as I turn to the computers. I fall into a zone, fingers dancing across the keyboard with a document open on one screen as I work on the other. A few more clicks and the document's metadata pops up on the screen. Information in the matrix of dates, times, and software versions.
Nothing juicy yet.
I begin to sift through the data, my eyes narrowing on the “last modified” field. Eight days ago? Huh. So the document was modified while the signatory was going through surgery. I pull up the security logs next—specifically, the entry records for the building. If someone was using this man’s credentials while he was in the hospital, they had to physically be in the office. I cross-reference the dates and times the credentials were used against the list of employees who badged in during those windows.
The list narrows quickly. Only five people were in the building during all the suspicious login times. I eliminate three based on their access levels—they couldn’t have reached the systems in question. That leaves two.
One of them is Derrick.
The other is Zack Pettibone.
I bite my lip as I type a series of commands, and the screen flickers, a new window opening to display a string of code. I run a program to extract more detailed information fromthe metadata, and then something pops up on the screen. A computer name.
Then I go pale.
It was fun, I realize. Playing detective at Lorenzo's company was fun, but I never accounted for the moment I would come face-to-face with the truth. I have a building, an office, and a username.
And most importantly, the identity of the mole in the Rossi family.
I save everything to an encrypted file and email it to myself as backup. Then I print out the key evidence—the login records, the metadata, the cross-referenced security logs—and leave the pages spread across my coffee table next to the employee file. If something happens to me, someone will find this.
