After the tense encounter with Hayes, Mel handled the necessary personal lies. She sat in her cramped dorm room, the excitement of her family feeling like a heavy burden.
She sent a short, professional email home. Her mother replied with ecstatic emojis. Her father, a simple, proud "Well done." Mel read their joy with a hollow heart. She had secured their financial safety, but the cost was a truth she couldn't share.
Informing Jenna was the most painful.
"I got the job. Full Strategy Consultant," Mel kept her voice light on the phone.
"Mel, that's insane! I knew it!" Jenna's genuine excitement was painful. "Forget the law degree, you're officially selling your soul for a seven-figure salary!"
"Something like that," Mel muttered, unable to share the details of the hostile takeover.
"We need to celebrate. Sam, me, garlic knots and terrible WiFi?" Jenna urged.
"I can't. I'm already buried," Mel lied, feeling the metaphorical Iron Cage tighten. "I'm in isolation for the first phase. No contact, corporate rules. Total secrecy."
"Seriously? They lock you in a room?"
"Something like that," Mel repeated. She had to keep Jenna's world, her honest, simple life, entirely separate from the complexity she was entering. The victory was hers alone to shoulder, and the secret was hers alone to keep.
She returned to her Kallen laptop and the opaque data. Hayes's deadline was looming.
The next morning, Mel was back at her isolated desk. She had to find five weak points in Kallen's logistics partners by the end of the day. The data was meticulously sanitized, designed to prove she was incompetent if she couldn't solve the problem, or fire her if she asked for the real truth.
Mel ignored the giant, clean financial reports. Instead, she looked for absurdities, the things that made no business sense unless someone was hiding something illegal:
Too Slow and Too Cheap (Points 1-3): She identified three shipping partners whose delivery times were wildly inefficient, yet their warehousing costs were near zero. The only logic: They were wasting time because they were making unrecorded stops—the perfect window for illegal labor or unreported cargo.
Pointless Travel (Point 4): A group of small, specific orders were routed to a tiny, out-of-the-way port before reaching their final destination, costing Kallen extra. *The only reason: They were meeting someone or transferring illegal goods where no one would look—a coverttransfer point.
The Missing Cash (Point 5): The money details for "Aethel Solutions" showed a huge variance between anticipated and actual spending, a gap too big for accounting error. A gap like that meant hidden payroll or illegal payments—the clear sign of the ethical mess.
Mel had found her five spots. They weren't just bad business; they were the perfectly camouflaged transfer points of Kallen's secret cover-up structure.
She wrote her report for Hayes, using clinical, boring financial language: "High Cost Risk," "Redundant Logistics," and "Unnecessary Spending." She showed him how to fix the problem without ever daring to mention the illegal labor.
She saved the report. Then, she opened her Kallen email. She found the draft email she had sent to Leila Vaughn the day before. Now, she added the coded coordinates to the end:
They gave me a big shovel and a very small hole to look through. The five weak points are the entrance to the trap. — M
She hit send. Mel had shown Hayes she could deliver results, but she had simultaneously given her ally the map to the crime. Her next move depended entirely on Leila's plan to get her the real secrets.