Chapter 7 - The Paper Trail of Betrayal
To find out what Daniel had been doing, we needed to get back into my house and secure my personal server.
Clara Vance accompanied us, along with two private security guards my mother had insisted on hiring. The house looked cold and abandoned when we arrived, the splintered front door a stark reminder of the violence that had unfolded only twenty-four hours ago.
"Check the study first," Clara said, keeping her hand near her coat pocket.
We walked into my home office. This was where I had spent years building my company. The walls were lined with whiteboards covered in code snippets and system architecture diagrams. On my desk sat my high-end computer, the heart of my operations.
It was gone.
The monitor was still there, but the tower—the custom-built server containing my local backups, my private correspondence, and early versions of my proprietary code—had been unscrewed and stolen.
"Daniel," I whispered, my heart sinking. "He took it."
"He didn't just take it," one of the security guards said, pointing to the floor behind the desk. "He ripped the backup drives out of the wall mount. He knew exactly what he was looking for."
My mother walked over to the desk and picked up a small, yellow sticky note that had fallen under the chair. On it was written a series of numbers and a name: Arthur Vance - 555-0192.
Clara stepped over and looked at the note. Her face darkened.
"Arthur Vance?" I asked. "Is he related to you?"
"No," Clara said, her voice dropping an octave. "Arthur Vance is a disbarred corporate attorney who specializes in 'corporate restructuring' for shady developers. He’s a fixer, Emily. If Daniel and his family went to him, they weren't just trying to steal your money. They were trying to find a way to claim ownership of your intellectual property."
She pulled out her phone and made a quick call. After a few minutes of quiet talking, she hung up and looked at me, her expression grim.
"My contacts in the DA's office say Richard just posted bail. And guess who paid it? A shell company registered to Arthur Vance."
"Why would a fixer pay Richard's bail?" my mother asked.
"Because they’ve offered him something valuable," Clara said. "The source code of Emily’s software. The acquisition contract has a clause: if the intellectual property is contested or found to be stolen, the buyer can cancel the sale and demand a full refund of the fifteen million, plus damages. They’re trying to blackmail you, Emily. They want to force you to give them half the money, or they will destroy the deal entirely by claiming Daniel helped write the code and owns fifty percent of the copyright."
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I stared at her, the sheer malice of the plan leaving me speechless. They didn't just want to take my money. They were willing to burn my entire life’s work to the ground if they couldn't have it.
"We need to find that server," I said, my voice shaking with a mix of fear and cold rage. "And we need to find it before they try to sell my code to a competitor."
