Part 2I Gave the Ten-Million Deal to My Accuser

The Slack channel went dead silent for a few minutes.

Slowly, private messages started trickling into my inbox from the core team.

[God, sorry Nicole. We just panicked. We know you wouldn't do that.]

[Yeah, we know how hard you've bled for this agency. Just ignore her.]

[Brittany is just a kid. She doesn't know how corporate billing works.]

My team wasn't stupid. They knew my character.

I let out a long breath, tossed the phone aside, and let the sheer exhaustion pull me under. I had been averaging four hours of sleep a night. I passed out the second my head hit the pillow.

The next morning, I walked into the bullpen with a coffee in hand, only to be met with dead silence and averted eyes.

I pulled my lead designer, Jenna, into a glass meeting room. When she told me what happened, the floor dropped out from under me.

While I was asleep, Brittany had created a new, private Slack channel. She invited everyone in the company. Except me.

Jenna showed me the chat logs. Brittany had spent the entire night brainwashing the staff.

[I can't stand watching her play you guys for absolute fools while you're struggling to pay rent.]

[Nicole signed a backdoor deal. The official contract shows one price, but the client is paying her a massive consulting fee on the side.]

[I have an inside source.]

[She already pocketed a cool million.]

[That million was supposed to be our hazard pay. Why are we letting her steal food from our tables?!]

Between her untouchable status as the boss's favorite and the absolute certainty in her tone, the desperate staff swallowed the bait.

[What the hell do we do? A million bucks split between us... that's five figures each.]

[I can't believe Nicole is a thief. Does Richard know?]

[Telling the CEO won't help if we don't have paper evidence.]

[She's smart. She probably scrubbed the paper trail months ago.]

Jenna looked at me, her eyes filled with conflict. "Nicole... I don't want to believe you'd do this to us..."

My heart ached. This was my team. But the agency hadn't paid us in two months. People were missing mortgage payments. Panic makes people turn on each other.

But what was Brittany's endgame? Was she clinically insane?

Regardless of whether the rumor was true, if this leaked outside these walls, our client would drop us like a bad habit. No company wants to work with a vendor under investigation for embezzlement.

If the deal died, the agency died. None of us would ever see our paychecks.

I had to cut the head off this snake right now.