“One night, his father walked into the office. He didn’t know I was there. When he saw me sitting at the terminal with Hung’s key plugged into the drive, he turned pale. He didn’t get angry. He just stared at me with this profound, agonizing sadness. He told me to go home, that the project was cancelled. The next morning, Hung told me his father was just stressed about a heart condition and that I shouldn’t worry about it.”
I looked up at Linh, horror dawning on me. “The old man wasn’t cold to me because he disliked me. He was distant because he knew what was coming. He didn’t want to get attached to a ghost.”
The Burning Secret
By 6:00 a.m., the rain had stopped, replaced by a thick, suffocating morning fog. I couldn’t sit still anymore. The weight of the unknown was driving me mad.
“I have to look,” I said, standing up.
“Look at what?” Linh asked, rubbing her tired eyes.
“The backup drive. When I was doing that accounting work, I saved a decrypted copy of the legacy ledger onto my personal cloud drive. I told myself it was just in case the system crashed during the migration, but I never deleted it.”
Linh immediately brought over her laptop. My hands trembled so violently I missed the keys twice while typing in my password. I bypassed the security prompts and navigated to a hidden folder labeled ‘Project-H’.
The screen illuminated our faces with a harsh, blue glow. I opened the master spreadsheet. To an ordinary person, it looked like thousands of rows of boring corporate expenses: steel procurement, soil testing, environmental permits.
But I was a trained accountant. I knew how to look between the lines.
I filtered the transactions by “Disbursement Type: Unclassified.” A list of fifty-two wire transfers appeared, all executed over the past three years. The total amount was staggering: over $140 million. Every single transfer originated from a subsidiary owned by Hung’s family, and every single one ended up in an offshore account registered in the Cayman Islands under a shell company named Aethelgard Ltd.
“That’s a lot of money for a construction project,” Linh muttered, leaning over my shoulder.
“It’s not for the project,” I whispered, my eyes scanning the dates. “Look at the execution times. Every transfer happened exactly three days after a major public infrastructure contract was awarded to their firm. This isn’t just money laundering, Linh. This is something else.”
I opened a secondary folder containing scanned attachments—receipts and memos that I hadn’t had time to examine months ago. My breath hitched.
Among the files were digital copies of identity cards. Dozens of them. All young women, mostly foreign workers or students from rural provinces who had come to the city looking for employment. Beside each photo was a medical profile: blood type, organ compatibility markers, and a single, chilling status column marked ‘Terminated’.
The room seemed to spin. The walls closed in on me. The “heavy equipment rentals” weren’t for cranes or bulldozers. The “concrete suppliers” weren’t selling cement.
Hung’s family wasn’t just built on corporate corruption. They were operating a highly sophisticated, multi-million-dollar illicit human trafficking and organ harvesting syndicate under the guise of their construction empire. And the high-rise development? It was a massive, concrete fortress designed to hide the medical facilities underground.
“Oh my god,” Linh gagged, covering her mouth, tears springing to her eyes. “Vy… you need to go to the police. Right now. This is insane.”
“No,” I choked out, a paralyzing wave of realization hitting me. “The police won’t help. Don’t you see who signed off on the environmental permits for the underground zoning? The Chief of District Police. His name is right here in the bribe ledger.”
We were completely, utterly helpless.
The Trap snaps Shut
Suddenly, the screen of my phone—which was sitting dead on the bed—flashed to life.
I jumped back, letting out a sharp scream.
“How is it on?” Linh gasped. “You turned it off!”
The screen wasn’t just displaying a call. It was displaying a live video feed. The phone had been remotely hard-booted and overridden. A hacking protocol.
The video on the screen showed a dark, dimly lit room. The camera panned down.
My heart stopped.
Bound to two wooden chairs in the center of the frame were my mother and father. My mother’s eyes were wide with terror, a thick piece of duct tape covering her mouth. My father looked pale, his chest heaving as he struggled to breathe without his oxygen machine. Standing behind them, looking perfectly manicured in his wedding tuxedo, was Hung.
He held the camera with one hand, while his other hand casually rested on my father’s fragile shoulder. He smiled into the lens—the same warm, handsome smile that had made me feel so safe.
“Good morning, my beautiful wife,” Hung’s voice echoed from the phone’s speaker, smooth and devoid of any malice, which made it infinitely more terrifying. “You missed our wedding night. My mother was terribly embarrassed explaining your absence to our guests.”
I fell to my knees in front of the phone, sobbing uncontrollably. “Hung… please… please don’t hurt them. They don’t know anything! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please…”
“I know they don’t know anything, sweetheart,” Hung replied softly, adjusting the camera angle so I could see the timer on my father’s medical monitor ticking down. “But you do. Or rather, you’re about to. My father always was a weak-willed sentimentalist. He thought he was saving you. But all he did was complicate things.”
Hung leaned closer to the camera, his eyes turning into cold, dark voids.
“You have exactly forty-five minutes to bring your laptop and the backup drive back to the hotel penthouse, Vy. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell your little friend to run. Because if you aren’t standing in front of me by 7:15 a.m., I will personally turn off your father’s pacemaker. And then, we’ll see how much your mother fetched on the open market.”
He blew a kiss toward the screen. “See you soon, my love.”
The screen went black.
The silence returned, heavier and deadlines than before. I stared at the blank phone, the laptop screen still glowing with the evidence of a monster’s empire, and the ten $100 bills on the nightstand.
I had forty-five minutes. If I stayed, my parents would die. If I went, I was walking straight into a slaughterhouse.
As I stood up, wiping the tears from my face, a soft, metallic click echoed from the front door of Linh’s apartment.
Linh and I froze, turning our heads slowly toward the entryway. The doorknob was turning, slowly, deliberately from the outside.
