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หน้าหลัก / The Bonus That Got Me Arrested / บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

บททั้งหมดของ The Bonus That Got Me Arrested: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

10

Chapter 1

"And now, please welcome this year's Employee of the Year: Skye Kiersey!"Desmond Ackman's voice blasted through the speakers, sharp enough to make my ears ring.I opened my eyes. On the LED screen ahead, a line of text glowed: Employee of the Year Award Bonus: 10,000,000 dollars.Ten million dollars. I stared at that string of zeros and felt a shiver run through me.I had been reborn. I was back at the very beginning of all this.In my last life, I'd stood on this same stage and lost my mind over that ten million. I took the giant check in front of the entire company, watching Desmond work the computer as he wired the money into my bank account. In that moment, I'd thought I'd won at life.The next morning, the police kicked down my door. The company had reported me for delusional disorder, claiming I'd exploited a loophole in the finance system to siphon off ten million dollars.Every video of the award ceremony and every transfer record on my phone had turned into garbled non
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Chapter 2

At six in the morning, I woke to someone slamming against my door."Open up! Police!""Coming."I opened the door to four officers standing outside."Skye Kiersey, I'm Detective Preston Marshall with the police department. I'm heading up this case. Desmond Ackman reported that you're suffering a mental disorder, that you grabbed the microphone onstage last night, and that you illegally accessed the finance system."Behind him stood Desmond and Vivian. Desmond looked utterly haggard."Skye, how could you do something like this?"Desmond clutched his chest, the picture of heartbroken disbelief."I treated you like a brother, and you went and stole ten million dollars from the company!"I watched his performance calmly."Mr. Ackman, wasn't that ten million the bonus you handed me last night?"Detective Marshall, there's footage from last night.""Ha, the footage is right here." Vivian held out a flash drive, her voice hoarse.Detective Marshall plugged it into a laptop. On sc
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Chapter 3

We soon reached the interrogation room."Skye, this is a statement about your medical history, signed by your parents."I stared at the pages, my chest tightening. The signatures were genuinely my parents' handwriting.[My son, Skye Kiersey, has recently shown frequent auditory and visual hallucinations, along with growing resentment toward society...]"No, that's impossible!"I slammed my hand on the table."My parents would never say something like this!""Skye, calm down."Detective Marshall held me back."Your parents are outside. They're worried sick about you."Desmond was vicious enough to threaten my parents with the death penalty, telling them the only way to save my life was to prove I was mentally ill. My simple, honest parents had signed just to protect me.Vivian walked into the interrogation room, dressed now in plain clothes, looking fragile and pitiful."Skye, I never thought you'd use my feelings against me like this."Vivian covered her face."You got cl
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Chapter 4

Chamberlin Psychiatric Hospital sat on the edge of the city. Its walls were wrapped in barbed wire, giving off an air of death.I was locked in an isolation room, arms and legs pinned inside a straitjacket. Dr. Cohen walked in holding an electroshock baton."Skye, Mr. Ackman says your treatment ends the moment you remember where that ten million went.""You want me to pay it back?"I spat out a mouthful of blood."Go ask Desmond yourself, you son of a bitch."Dr. Cohen shot his men a look."Turn up the current. He's still got some fight in him."The shock tore through me and I blacked out instantly.Half-conscious, I drifted back to the stage from the day of the awards ceremony.That ten million had never been company funds at all. It was dirty money that hadn't been laundered yet. Desmond had deposited it into my account to use my identity as a shell.Reporting me for embezzlement was just a way to legally freeze the money as "criminal proceeds." Once frozen, the funds slip
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Chapter 5

"It's in your throat! Ha ha ha!"My voice echoed off the padded walls of the isolation room, edged with madness.Desmond's pupils shrank. The false smile on his face froze, his muscles twitching, his eyes flooding with panic. He raised a hand to his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing."You... what are you talking nonsense about?"His voice cracked, betraying just how rattled he was."Nonsense? Desmond, I handled your core ledgers for three years. I know you better than anyone."You're paranoid by nature. You don't even trust Vivian. So where would you actually hide that ten million in dirty money before it gets converted into digital currency?"I kept my eyes locked on him. His hand drifted, unconsciously, to his stomach. The last shred of doubt in my mind vanished. I burst out laughing."That medal was only bait. The real hardware is a microchip."You decided the safest place for it was your own body."So yesterday, right before you went on stage, you used a sip of water as co
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Chapter 6

I locked the ward's iron door and tied the unconscious Desmond up together with the guards. I bound Vivian to the hospital bed with the straitjacket.I quickly hacked into the system's backend, disabled the signal jammer, and called Detective Marshall at the city's criminal investigation division."Detective, it's Skye Kiersey. I'm at Chamberlin Psychiatric Hospital right now."I got straight to the point, my voice unnervingly calm."Skye?! Aren't you under mandatory treatment? How did you get a phone? Don't do anything reckless!""I'm not the one being reckless. Desmond Ackman is.""Detective, you interrogated me all night and listened to a pile of 'witness' testimony. But did you ever actually check whether any of that evidence was real?"I threw out my first question with a cold smile."You say I went insane and hacked the system. Then answer me this. In the finance system's core logs, five minutes before I went up on stage to accept my award, someone with the highest access
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Chapter 7

The police hadn't arrived yet, but the psychiatric building had already fallen dead silent. Dr. Cohen seemed to have gone off to check his email, and his men stood frozen, glancing at each other, not daring to move.I leaned against the wall, catching my breath, my mind racing through everything I knew. This wasn't enough. Desmond's legal team was strong. He could find a scapegoat and slip free at any moment. I needed evidence solid enough that he could never claw his way back out.I looked up at the air vent connecting to the other wards in the building. I grabbed a chair and smashed open the grate, shouting into the opening."Marcus! Zoey! If you're not dead yet, make some noise!"I've taken Desmond down. The police are on their way. If you want to live, tell me where the ledgers are hidden!"After I finished, two minutes of dead silence followed. Just as I started to think they'd already been killed, a faint, hoarse response drifted up from deep inside the vent."Second floo
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Chapter 8

Inside the interrogation room, I saw Desmond again. Only this time, he was the one sitting in the chair, wrists cuffed.As the key witness who'd cracked the case, I sat beside Detective Marshall. Even now, backed into a corner, Desmond still refused to give an inch."Detective, someone clearly planted those ledgers on me! I don't know the first thing about any money laundering."As for that ten million, yes, it was the bonus I'd prepared for Skye. But then he had some kind of breakdown and made an error that left the money's whereabouts a mystery. How is that my fault?"Your department can't convict me just because a few employees changed their story."I looked at him and suddenly smiled. I stood up and walked over to face him."Desmond, do you honestly think that as long as you don't admit to swallowing that microchip in a capsule, the police will never trace where the money went? That they'll never be able to convict you of a crime?"Desmond let out a cold snort and turned his
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Chapter 9

The case reached its turning point.Once the police pulled the forged check out from under the bronze eagle statue and forensic testing confirmed the seal was fake, the criminal network behind Desmond collapsed entirely.The moment he was caught, Vivian flipped to save herself, turning into a cooperating witness against him.During cross-examination in court, Vivian laid out every one of Desmond's methods: how he'd used AI to swap the surveillance footage, how he'd spiked the champagne, how he'd bought off everyone around me, even how he'd forged the medical report used to deceive my parents.At the end, Vivian added one more thing."I thought sticking with him would get me everything. Instead, I lost myself along with it."I let out a cold laugh and submitted an audio recording to the judge in open court, one obtained from a foreign medical facility. The recording captured, in clear detail, a conversation between Desmond and an illegal organ trafficking ring overseas."That mat
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Chapter 10

When the trial ended, I walked out through the courthouse doors.The rain had stopped. A faint but steady beam of sunlight broke through the clouds. At the bottom of the steps stood a group of familiar faces, Ronney and the rest of the coworkers who'd once claimed at the gala that I'd lost my mind.The moment Ronney saw me, he dropped to his knees in a puddle, muddy water splashing across his face, sobbing."Skye, man, I'm so sorry! Desmond scared the hell out of me. Please, tell the court, tell the industry association, don't let them blacklist us!"My wife just had a baby. If I lose my job, my whole family is finished..."Right behind him, dozens of other coworkers bowed their heads and hunched their shoulders too. Their pleading rose and fell around me, sounding especially jarring against the empty space outside the courthouse.I stopped and looked down at them.In my last life, screaming in despair strapped to that electroshock chair, I'd sworn that if I ever got a second ch
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