Part 2She Marked My Warning As Read

I looked over at Jessie’s station. Computer off. Desk cleared. She was long gone.

She’d dropped the keys, snapped a photo of the note for "evidence," and fled, thinking she’d successfully forced me into a corner.

I didn't make a sound. I simply picked up the keys and slid them into my coat pocket. If she wanted a trap, I was going to make sure it was airtight.

I walked to the window. Down on the street, Jessie was standing by the curb, wearing an oversized sun hat and a flowy sundress, clutching a pink designer suitcase. She was staring at her phone, waiting for her Uber.

I took the stairs, fast.

She was facing away from the building, her back to the lobby doors. She was totally absorbed in tracking her ride on the app. I walked past her, pretending to be on a heated phone call, moving through the crowd like just another busy city professional.

As I brushed past her suitcase, I moved with the precision of a ghost. My fingers caught the hidden zipper on the very bottom of her bag—the small, flat compartment people usually use for laundry or spare shoes.

A quick pull, a silent shove. I jammed the heavy brass keys and the pink note deep into that hidden pocket and zipped it shut.

I vanished into the sea of commuters.

Seconds later, a black sedan pulled up. Jessie smiled brightly, watched the driver lift her bag into the trunk, and sped away toward the airport.

I watched the car disappear and felt a cold, sharp satisfaction. You wanted to play games, Jessie? Now you own the stakes.

The next morning, I didn't set an alarm. I woke up to the sun streaming through my apartment windows. I made a slow pot of coffee, sat on my sofa, and placed my phone on the coffee table like a ticking bomb.

At 8:05 AM, it started. The vibration hummed against the wood.

Jessie was calling. Once, twice, three times.

I watched the screen light up with her name. I knew the script. She was probably lying in a cabana in Cabo, frantically trying to "remind" me to open the warehouse, hoping to browbeat me into submission one last time.

Even if I didn't answer, she wouldn't worry. She assumed that once the boss realized the warehouse was locked, he’d call me, use some corporate "team player" rhetoric, and force me to go in and clean up her mess.

"You want to play the moral high ground?" I whispered to the empty room. "Fine."

I swiped the phone into Airplane Mode and shoved it under a pillow.

Two thousand miles away, Jessie listened to the automated voicemail for the tenth time. She wasn't panicked; she was smirking.

"Going dark, are we, Nicole?" she muttered, tossing her phone onto a lounge chair. "Fine. Stay home. Let's see how you explain it to Garrison when he finds out the most important shipment of the year is sitting behind a locked door."

She put on her sunglasses and headed for the water, already picturing my tearful apology in the manager's office on Monday.

At 10:00 AM, back at the office, a ten-centimeter high-pressure fire main on the second floor finally gave up. Years of internal corrosion met a sudden surge in pressure. With a muffled roar, the pipe burst, sending a geyser of water through the ceiling tiles.

The water didn't stay on the second floor. It followed the gravity of least resistance, pouring directly down the conduits into the first floor.

Directly into Warehouse A.

Inside that warehouse sat the "Big Bet"—twenty thousand precision electronic motherboards, worth nearly eighty thousand dollars. Our boss had literally put his house up as collateral to secure the credit line for this order. They were slated for delivery to our biggest client in Seattle on Tuesday morning.

If those boards sat in water for more than ten minutes, they were scrap metal.

When the security guard finally noticed the sound, the hallway was already a lake. Muddy, yellowish water was bubbling out from under the heavy steel shutter of the warehouse door.

He called the property manager. The manager checked the logs and called the boss.