Chapter 4 - The Butler's Ledger
The next morning, Dragan’s lead employment attorney called Oswald, the seventy-year-old, straight-backed butler who had managed Hawthorne House for forty years.
She expected to have to coax information out of a frightened employee.
Instead, Oswald answered the phone with complete, freezing clarity.
"I have been waiting for someone to ask the correct question," Oswald stated smoothly.
"What question?" the attorney asked.
"Whether Miss Voskin is the first person this has happened to."
Oswald didn't just have suspicions. He had receipts. For forty years, Oswald had known that human memory became unreliable under pressure, but ink did not. He opened the locked drawer beside his bed and pulled out a thick, leather-bound notebook.
Inside were meticulous records. Dates. Times. Exact quotes. Incident locations.
But Oswald had something far more devastating than a diary.
He pulled out a heavy, encrypted backup drive.
"Three weeks ago," Oswald explained over the phone, "Clarissa ordered me to overwrite the shared-area security system data. I told her I did. I lied."
Oswald plugged the drive into his computer and played a specific audio file.
On the recording, Clarissa Merrill was laughing hysterically with one of her corporate executives inside the mansion’s study.
"The damaged shipment was worth more to me broken than sold," Clarissa’s recorded voice boasted cruelly. "Insurance pays out triple for ruined prototypes. And the stupid little kitchen girl makes the absolute perfect scapegoat to explain the damage."
Oswald paused the recording.
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"Tell Mr. Kovac that we are no longer dealing with a cruel woman," Oswald stated coldly. "We are dealing with a multi-million-dollar insurance fraud scheme."
👉 Dragan heard the recording, and the executioner inside him officially awakened.
