The handwritten note remained on Sebastian's desk long after midnight.
If you are reading this, they never found the money. Simple words. No signature.
No explanation. Just a sentence that somehow felt heavier than every file he had reviewed during the previous week.
Outside his office window, the capital shimmered beneath the darkness. Thousands of lights stretched toward the horizon. Most of the city was asleep.
Sebastian wasn't. He read the note again.
Then opened the file.
The first few pages contained financial records from nearly seven years earlier. Nothing extraordinary at first glance. Government transfers. Infrastructure budgets. Development funds.
Then the numbers stopped making sense.
Money had left government accounts.
But it had never arrived where it was supposed to go.
Instead, it had traveled through a maze of shell companies. A company paying another company.
That company paying a consulting firm.
