Luis’s expression doesn’t change, but his eyes sharpen.
“We don’t fight them like rich people fight,” he says.
“We fight them like janitors fight.”
He taps the desk lightly. “Slow. Quiet. With receipts.”
You spend the next hour building a plan in a closet that smells like bleach and rebellion.
Luis insists you do nothing from your phone, nothing from your corporate devices, nothing that pings your usual digital footprint.
You use his old laptop to create a new email, new cloud storage, and multiple backups.
You learn quickly that a man who cleans an office for twenty years is an expert at hiding things in plain sight.
When you try to call your head of security, Luis stops you.
“Don’t,” he says. “If Miranda owns the CFO seat, she owns people you think are loyal.”
You swallow the instinct to bulldoze through the problem, because bulldozing is what got you here.
Instead, you let Luis guide you like he’s steering a ship through fog.
Your first move is not revenge.
It’s survival.
You need your personal accounts unfrozen, a safe place to sleep, and a lawyer who isn’t on Miranda’s payroll.
Luis gives you a name: Marisol Chen, a former federal prosecutor who now takes white-collar cases that smell like injustice.
“She helped my nephew,” Luis says simply.
Your eyebrows lift.
Luis shrugs. “I told you. Invisible people have networks too.”
