My sister wrenched my arm backward until the bone snapped, then left me gasping on the rug. At the ER, my mother leaned close and whispered, “Tell them you tripped on the stairs.

By eight o'clock the next morning, I was sitting at the head of the polished mahogany table in the executive boardroom of Sterling Logistics. My right arm was encased in a heavy blue fiberglass cast slung securely across my chest, but my mind had never been clearer.

Surrounding me were the six surviving members of the board of directors, all older men and women who had worked alongside my father for decades. At the far end of the room, Harrison Grant and his forensic accounting team had projected a massive financial flowchart onto the wall screens.

"What you are looking at," Harrison said, pointing a laser pointer at a web of red lines connecting our corporate operating accounts to a bank in the Cayman Islands, "is a systematic, six-month embezzlement operation executed by our acting CEO, Camille Sterling."

An uncomfortable murmur rippled through the boardroom. Arthur Pendelton, the board's senior advisor and my father's oldest friend, leaned forward, his face pale. "How much did she take, Sydney?"

"Four point two million dollars, Arthur," I said, tapping my working fingers against the table. "She used her executive credentials to approve fictitious vendor invoices for international freight maintenance. But as the company’s lead systems analyst, I noticed the IP addresses for those vendor portals were being routed directly through a private server set up in Camille’s condo."

"Good Lord," whispered Evelyn Vance, the head of HR. "If our lenders see this discrepancy during the quarterly audit next week, they'll pull our credit lines. We could face insolvency within a month."

"They won't see a discrepancy," I said smoothly, sliding a stack of legal documents down the center of the table. "Because we are being proactive. While Camille sat in a holding cell last night, Harrison filed a formal fraud report with the FBI Financial Crimes Division. We have frozen all of her accounts, both domestic and international."

I stood up, resting my good hand on the leather back of my chair. "I am calling for an immediate vote to terminate Camille Sterling as Chief Executive Officer for cause, stripping her of all executive compensation and board privileges. Furthermore, per Section 14 of Dad's corporate bylaws regarding felony misconduct, her equity shares will be seized into corporate escrow pending the outcome of the criminal trial."