Chapter 3My Enemy Built My Alibi

"I didn't do this!"

I jerked my head up. I forced my eyes to widen, letting them rim with red, pitching my voice into a raw, gravelly shout of a man who had been deeply and violently wronged.

"During that entire window, I was locked onto my monitors! I was trading! I didn't step away from this desk for a single second!"

My furious, unhinged reaction was exactly what they wanted to see. The desperate flailing of a pathetic, cornered animal.

Bradley predictably let out a contemptuous scoff.

"Still lying? You don't even have the spine to own up to your sickness."

He turned to the gathered crowd. "Let's ask the floor. Did anyone see our star trader at his desk a half-hour ago?"

His gaze slowly, deliberately swept over the room.

The air turned solid.

Nobody spoke.

The junior analysts who had sprinted over from the bullpen—the kids I had personally mentored, the ones who swore they'd follow me to any firm I went to—all suddenly found their shoes incredibly interesting.

Bradley's eyes finally settled on Cameron.

"You tell us, Cameron."

Cameron was my protégé. I had built him from the ground up.

Three years ago, he was a fresh grad who didn't even know how to read a basic candlestick chart. I taught him everything. When he blew a two-million-dollar hole in his portfolio his first year, I quietly used my own year-end bonus to cover the deficit so he wouldn't get fired.

As long as I'm here, I used to tell him, you have the safety net to make mistakes. Just learn from them.

Now, the entire floor was staring at Cameron. It was his turn to make a choice.

He took a slow, deep breath, lifted his chin, and looked me dead in the eye. His stare was glassy, completely devoid of the kid I used to know.

"Yes. Half an hour ago, I personally saw Miles force Paige into the rest lounge. He locked the door behind them."

In that moment, an icy chill radiated through my chest.

For three years, I had been warming a viper in my pocket.

I remembered him when he first started, so timid he’d stutter when asking me a question.

I remembered finding him crying in the stairwell after his first major loss. I had clapped a hand on his trembling shoulder, telling him that the market breaks everyone eventually, and what mattered was how you pieced yourself back together.

I remembered when my mother was diagnosed, how he had run himself ragged bringing us dinners at the hospital, calling her "Auntie" with a warmth that felt so agonizingly real.

All of it. An illusion. A performance.

For the promise of a promotion, for a sliver of my year-end bonus pool, he was willing to shove me off a cliff and stomp on my fingers as I fell.