Total pages in book: 21
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 19922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 100(@200wpm)___ 80(@250wpm)___ 66(@300wpm)
The email came from his legal department, which was in charge of keeping track of every individual who had once been part of his father's empire. The living and the dead. The imprisoned and the free. Their debts. Their families. Their unfinished business.
Today, the report his team forwarded was about the death of a man named Homer Nolan. Mykos read it standing in the empty loading dock, the washcloth still in his hand.
Homer Nolan had worked for Diogenes for a short while before being charged with illegal possession of firearms and a string of related offenses. He received a life sentence but kept his mouth shut while serving his time. That was the only loyalty their world respected.
In his latter years, a scamming operation had targeted his identity and borrowed heavily under his name. Nolan hadn't known. He'd died a month ago from a heart attack, and the debts he never incurred had passed on to his only living relative.
His daughter.
Mykos clicked on the photo attached to the report.
Ah.
Something stirred inside of him.
He had thought this was simply to be his next assignment. One of those rare cases that came to him through the mechanics of routine surveillance, requiring nothing more than a phone call to his legal team and a transfer of funds to settle the debt.
But instead...
Mykos looked at the photo for a long time.
A nineteen-year-old girl with blond hair and green eyes. A slender build that should have made her look fragile, but there was something about the set of her shoulders that made Homer’s daughter seem like a model of resilience instead.
Mykos pocketed his phone.
Tomorrow, if he still remembered this girl existed...
Then he would personally make a move.
The Deal
the deal (n.): an agreement between two parties, typically one in which one party has all the power and the other has a paper due on Thursday
THE LETTERS DIDN'T make sense.
Maika had been sitting on the floor of her apartment for two hours, her father's papers fanned out around her in a semicircle that she had initially organized by date, then reorganized by level of terror.
But it didn't work. If anything, seeing all those numbers typed in red ink, encircled, and in bold just made everything worse.
She understood "balance due." She understood "final notice." She understood the one that had IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED stamped across the top in red ink, because she was a literature major, not illiterate.
But the rest of it, the paragraphs about "collateralized obligations" and "outstanding principal with accrued interest" and something called a "demand note" that was exactly as threatening as it sounded? They might as well have been written in a different language.
She had Googled "what happens if you can't pay someone else's debt" and the answers alone were enough to delete her browser history and start again. She had thought to herself, maybe...
Maybe if I'm more specific, the answers might be...kinder?
So she had asked Google if it could find any real-life stories about nineteen-year-old college sophomores who only had less than fifty dollars (no, wait, if she had to be specific, make that $46.23) in their bank account but were suddenly obliged to pay for their father's debts. And that father—it had to be said, just to be really specific—happened to have been absent their entire life since he was behind bars in another country.
Unfortunately, Google hadn't any answer to that, and so she had asked ChatGPT the same thing, but nope. Not a single story. And that was why she had ended up here, on the floor, surrounded by someone else's bills, and she just didn't know—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Maika's heart hammered against her chest the moment she heard this.
Two men had come to her door yesterday. Her father had owed them money, they said quite pleasantly, and it was her duty to pay them. She was blood, after all, and they weren't interested to hear about how she had never even seen her father, and he had never even tried to contact her.
Ever.
The men had only told her they would be back tomorrow, and unfortunately, their words had sounded more like a threat than a promise. Worse, yesterday's tomorrow was today, and when they knocked again, she was so, so tempted to just crawl under her bed and hide until they went away.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Please just go away.
"Ms. Nolan? This is campus security."
C-Campus security?
Maika's legs shook as she forced herself to get to her feet. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt like she was about to have a heart attack at any moment. She raised herself on her toes and pressed one eye to the peephole—
Oh, thank goodness!
Maika quickly opened the door, her body shaking in relief. "Uh, w-what is it?"
"My name is Officer Anson." The older man showed her his security badge and ID. "We've been informed you received unwanted visitors yesterday?"