Shortly after three in the afternoon, a frantic knock at my door distracted me from my paperwork. I closed my laptop, then rose from my desk. There were only a handful of people who had unimpeded access to my office—the upper executives under my employ and my personal secretary, Lena—so it came as no surprise when I pulled open the door to find Eugene Westward standing on the other side.

Eugene was balding. A crown of wispy black hair sprouted from the sides of his head, but the top had receded year by year until it had vanished completely. From time to time, Eugene combed his wispy hairs over his massive bald spot in what I believed was an attempt to conceal the fact that his problem had advanced beyond the point of no return, but today was not one of those days. Today, his hair stuck out from either side of his head, but was flattened at the back, like he’d been tugging at it in frustration all morning.

He may have been a touch balder than the last time I’d seen him. It was hard to tell.

“Sir?” Westward asked timidly. He folded his fingers together and glanced at his shoes, but didn’t dare come into my office. “Hello, sir. I’m, um, I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s important—imperative—that we have a conversation. Whatever you’re working on, no matter how pressing it is, needs to wait.”

Nothing I’d been working on was pressing. I took a step back from the doorway and looked Westward over, a repressed laugh tugging at the corner of my lips. Westward had been with me since before I’d taken over The Palisade from my father, and he’d served as my executive adviser since. To this day, he was the same, pudgy, bumbling man I’d gotten to know while learning how to run the family business—nervous, anxious, but entirely reliable.

“Come inside, Westward,” I said. I gestured into the room, but kept a hand on the door. “If whatever you have to say is that important, then we shouldn’t have the conversation out in the hallway.”

“No, certainly not.” Westward scurried inside. He moved just as frantically as he spoke. “Really, you should be sitting down for this, so it’s best we go speak at your desk. I’d like you to be comfortable, please.”

I arched a brow. “Is that so?”

“Yes. Very, very much so.” Westward plucked at his sleeves, toying nervously with the buttons of his cuffs. A thin sheen of perspiration glistened on his brow, and his cheeks were red. His pasty skin contrasted with the bold color and made his beady blue eyes pop. “It really is advisable that you… that you sit down for this. It’s in your best interest.”

Well, that was new. Most of the time, when Westward came to tell me the sky was falling, he rushed through a long-winded explanation as soon as the door was closed. It wasn’t like him to hold back on potentially world-ending information.

Tantalized by the change, and rather amused by his behavior, I crossed my arms loosely over my chest and cocked my head to the side. “Well, Westward, I’ll have you know that I’ve had enough sitting for today. Why don’t you tell me while I’m standing? It’ll be good for my circulation.”

Westward let out a panicked breath through his nostrils, whistling like a tea kettle. “Sir…”

The laugh I’d been holding back arrived, and no amount of biting my tongue could stop it. I truncated it into one crisp bark, then shook my head. “If I pass out and break my skull while falling, I won’t hold you accountable. If you’ve got a medical release form, I’ll sign it.”

“Sir,” Westward said, exasperated. “Really…”

“Go ahead. What’s the trouble-du-jour?” I anticipated more of the same old. Some upheaval in the staff—maybe a lost contract with a client. If we lost our cleaning company, Pressed 4 Time, it would throw a serious wrench in our hotel operations. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was exactly what had happened. “I’m ready.”

“There’s been an incident, sir,” Westward murmured. He glanced aside, then shook his head like a dog fresh out of the bath. Whatever was causing him so much grief had to be bad if he needed to power through his anxiety like that. I’d worked with Westward long enough to know that, for as nervous as he always was, he wasn’t often twitchy. “It’s about Donovan Redding, sir.”

“Redding?” I narrowed my eyes, trying to piece together what Westward was going on about. For the last five years, Redding had been my director of facilities—one of the men instrumental in assuring the casino’s quarterly goals were met by overseeing interior operations. Amongst other things, he was responsible for plans, budgeting, and scheduling modifications to the casino and its staff structure. “He’s been sick for the last few days—he hasn’t gotten worse, has he? Is everything okay?”

“No, that’s not it.” Westward sighed nervously. He wrung his hands. “Mr. Redding didn’t come in for work today, either, but Ms. Afia needed to get in touch with him regarding a… a…” Westward shook his head again, then tugged at his hair nervously and continued. His glasses were crooked, but he didn’t seem to notice. “It doesn’t matter. Ms. Afia needed to get in touch with him, so she called his cell phone, figuring she’d leave a message if he didn’t pick up, just like every other time we’ve tried. Only this time, the number was disconnected.”

“What?” I frowned. “Disconnected?”

“It was… very strange,” Westward agreed. “No one quite knew what to do about it. But Ms. Afia is very perceptive, and she got in touch with HR, who placed a call to his other number on file. It was disconnected, too.”

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “Why would Redding’s numbers be disconnected? There must be an issue with his service provider. Doesn’t he have a company phone?”

“That’s the thing, sir…” Westward sighed nervously. He couldn’t stop wringing his hands. “The only phone still connected was Redding’s work phone, which we discovered sitting on his empty desk. Empty, as in… the desk was vacated. Stripped down. The room had been gutted. It was like Redding had never been there at all.”

“Westward, you’re making me feel like I’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone.” I glanced at my closed office doors, glad that I’d dragged him inside. I was beginning to regret not taking Westward’s advice to sit. The conversation was unsettling enough as it was, and I knew the other shoe was about to drop. “What’s going on with Redding?”

Westward sucked in a breath, lips rounded like a fish hauled out of water. “The short of it is… Mr. Redding has been embezzling money from The Palisade since his first year of employment, and we suspect that he’s fled the country, likely to Southeast Asia.”

Westward might as well have slapped me full-force for the effect those words had on me. For a moment, I was breathless, too stunned to speak. Then, as I gathered my resources, I asked the question I dreaded the most. “How much has he embezzled?”

“It’s… it’s too early to tell for certain,” Westward mumbled. “But… early reports predict probably… probably in the tens of millions, sir. He was sending money to a fraudulent vendor of his own design—a cleaning company the hotel had allegedly been sending its linens to, Pressed 4 Time. As it turns out, there were two companies listed who took care of the hotel’s washing… but only one of them was real. Mr. Redding… claimed those expenses as taxable deductions to remove them from Palisade profits, then provided falsified receipts for them, which he submitted to the accounting department without issue. Everything appeared to be above the board by the books. Until Ms. Afia demanded an investigation, there were no red flags at all.”

Time slowed. Syllables blurred. I stared at Westward as dread crumpled my stomach and the tremendous pressure of an unbearable burden settled on my shoulders. Tens of millions of dollars gone, falsified reports sent to the IRS as factual and true, and expenses the casino had claimed, but could no longer prove…

Redding hadn’t only screwed me—he’d fucked me over, taken pictures of the mess, then posted them online for the whole world to see. If we were audited—and after this, I knew it was only a matter of time—what was I going to do? Depending on how much Redding had spirited away with, I’d owe tens of millions in back taxes on his tens of millions of dollars stolen, and that was money we’d never see.

Not a dollar of it.

Because if Redding had fled the country and gone to Southeast Asia with that kind of cash? There was no way that he was ever setting foot on US soil again. He’d spend the rest of his days slung up in a hammock by the ocean, waited on hand and foot by locals he’d keep on his private payroll. He’d shed his identity like a snake sheds its skin and start life over as Pete, or Hank, or Bill. And he’d do it all on money stolen from me.

Money that should have belonged to Master.

The dread in my stomach tightened. Pressure pushed at my skull, and black dots appeared before my eyes.

What was Master going to think of this? Tens of millions of dollars, gone. Money he’d never known existed. Money I’d never known existed.

Money that was going to affect my bottom dollar, now that I knew about it.

“Do you need to sit down, sir?” Westward asked. He continued to wring his hands. If he didn’t stop, he was going to twist them off at the wrist. “I asked if you would, but you… you were insistent, so…”

“Westward,” I said, my voice thin. “I don’t need to sit down. I need you to get me a bottle of bourbon—any kind will do—and then I need you to get out of my office so that I can figure out what the hell I’m going to do.”

“Would you like a glass, sir?” Westward stumbled over his feet on the way to the door.

I glared at him. He got the message.

“R-right away, sir,” Westward promised. “It’ll be… be just a few minutes. I’ll take care of it immediately.”

“Thank you.”

I watched as Westward attempted several times to push the door open, using more and more force, until, desperately, he realized his folly and yanked the door open. He scurried out the door, then slammed it accidentally. From behind the oak, I heard him shout, “Sorry, sir!” before there was total silence.

He was gone.

Once I had silence, I counted down from ten to give Westward ample time to distance himself from the door, then lifted a hand to my mouth and held it there, like if I could keep my scream contained, my problem would disappear.

My accounting team would work out a solution. They would find a way to tweak our disbursements to recover the money we’d need to pay when we adjusted the last five years of taxes. What bothered me wasn’t the threat of financial ruin—the twisting feeling in my gut was brought on by two distinct feelings, each of them unmistakable.

First was the profound sense of violation—someone I trusted had stolen from me, stabbing me in the back in the process.

The second, and the one I kept coming back to time and time again, was how upset Master would be that I’d allowed such a trespass to happen. When he found out—and he would, even if I tried to keep it hidden from him—I’d be in shit. Deep, deep shit.

Multiple millions lost in the blink of an eye. Money I hadn’t even known I had.

Master was going to kill me. All the bourbon in the world wouldn’t save me from that.