Chapter 96 A Knife Called Friendship
The email came in at exactly 2:17 a.m.
I remembered the time because I hadn’t been asleep.
Sleep had become something that belonged to a version of me that still trusted people.
My phone buzzed against the nightstand, the sound cutting through the silence. I stared at the ceiling for a second before reaching for it, already irritated.
It was from an unknown sender with the sender:
You are looking in the wrong direction.
That alone was enough to make my chest tighten.
“What’s this?”
I opened it.
There was no greeting and no signature.
Just attachments and one line which said:
Start with your friend.
My jaw immediately tightened.
And for a long second, I just stared at the files.
Then I tapped one open.
It was bank statements.
At first glance, nothing looked unusual.
Just standard company transactions, operational expenses, and vendor payments.
Then I noticed a pattern.
How funds were siphoned from my company’s account with clear evidence that Marcus was the mastermind.
I jumped out of bed, running my fingers through my hair as I paced my room.
“No… no… this doesn’t make sense.”
“Marcus can’t do something like this.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes because it was the same Marcus who stood by me when all this started.
I opened more emails from the sender and each one was worse than the last.
By the time I got to the final attachment, my hands were already shaking.
When I was done, I couldn’t sleep.
I remembered the day Cassandra called Marcus’s name without introduction and right then, everything started to make sense.
Cassandra had been working with Marcus.
But how was that possible?
Marcus had also been the one sabotaging my deals.
I was just processing the whole thing and different questions ran through my mind.
“What did I do to Marcus?”
“Why did he want to destroy me?”
The next morning, I got to the office earlier than usual and sat behind my desk, then I spread out the already printed evidence on my desk.
Before sunrise, I had called a forensic auditor and it had been confirmed that everything in the email was real.
Marcus had been siphoning funds from the company for months, carefully and strategically like he had it all planned.
My jaw clenched and I leaned back in my chair, staring at the door and waiting for it to open.
Right on cue, it opened.
Marcus walked in with a smile on his face like it was just another day.
He walked in as if there was nothing wrong.
“Hey, man. I was surprised to see your car parked outside,” he said.
But the smile on his face disappeared when he saw the look on my face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, dropping into the chair across from me.
I didn’t respond, I just watched him, my fists clenched on my thigh as I tried to calm myself down to not blow things out of proportion.
For the first time, something about him felt unfamiliar.
When he noticed that I wasn’t saying anything, he frowned slightly.
“What?” he asked again.
I leaned forward slowly, my eyebrows raised.
“What did I ever do to you?”
“What do you mean?” he replied, feigning ignorance.
I scoffed and slid the file across the desk toward him.
“Explain this.”
He glanced at it, then back at me and back at it again.
I stared at him and studied his face, and at that moment I saw that flicker in his eyes.
First it was recognition, then composure.
“What is this?” he asked, avoiding eye contact with me.
I let out a short, dry laugh.
“Don’t do that, Marcus,” I said simply.
“Alex…” he muttered, his expression slightly hardening.
“Don’t dare spin this. Because these papers right here have all the explanations I needed,” I retorted, my voice sharper.
He pushed the file back to me and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his beard as he studied my face.
Then something I hadn’t seen before shifted in his eyes.
Or maybe something I had ignored.
“You went digging,” he finally said.
“What?” I said, my eyebrows furrowed.
That wasn’t a question.
Then he let out a small cold smile.
“You finally figured it out,” he scoffed.
The words triggered anger in me and I stood so fast that my chair scraped the ground.
“Figured what out?” I demanded.
“That my best friend has been stealing from me? That everything falling apart in my company leads back to you?”
“If that’s how you want to put it,” he smirked.
MARCUS REED’S POV
Maybe this was better.
There was no more pretending.
No more watching him sit at the top while I stood behind him like a footnote.
I let out a quiet breath and leaned forward.
“I built the idea of this company with you, Alex,” I said firmly.
“I planned with you.”
“And I gave you a job!” he shot back.
I scoffed.
“A job?” I repeated, shaking my head.
“That’s what you reduced me to,” I added, lifting my gaze to his.
“What are you saying? I built my company myself,” his expression hardened.
“We built it,” I corrected.
“No,” he snapped.
“I took the risk. I found the investors. I carried the weight.”
“And I stood beside you through all of it!” My voice rose.
“But when it was time to decide ownership, when it was time to make it official, what did you do?”
He didn’t answer.
Because he knew that I was right.
“You made yourself the sole owner,” I said, my voice low.
He still didn’t say a thing. He just looked at me, his hands on the desk.
“You are just freaking greedy, Marcus,” he snarled.
I smiled faintly.
“Get out,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I raised an eyebrow.
“You are fired,” he said, his eyes bloodshot.
Before I could say anything else, two police officers barged into his office.
“You think this ends here?” I asked, but he looked away from me immediately.
“Take him away,” he said to the officers.
“You are under arrest for corporate fraud and embezzlement,” one of the police officers said, and held a handcuff up.
“You are really getting me arrested?”
“Please cooperate,” the second officer said.
I extended my hands and I was handcuffed.
Then led out of his office.
ALEX HART’S POV
I watched them take him away, and just like that, everything changed.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at the spot where he had just been.
Before long, the news of his arrest had already spread like wildfire among the workers.
They started talking about him.
Some said he didn’t look like he could do a thing like that while some said they already knew his intentions towards me were bad.
When I got tired of the gossip, I reached for my jacket and closed up for the day.
I needed to rest my head at least.
On my way to my car, a person approached me.
I froze.
“You?”