My parents forced me to stay home to feed the dog and water the plants while the whole family went on vacation.

I opened the thick, leather-bound poetry book in front of Officer Reid. It wasn't actually a book. The center pages had been meticulously hollowed out years ago. Inside the hollowed-out core sat a heavy, encrypted USB flash drive and a black leather notebook filled with dense financial entries. "When I left yesterday," I explained, "I grabbed my emergency cash from this book. But I also took this drive and notebook. I found them buried in the back of my closet six months ago behind my old school textbooks. I thought they were just old business records my dad had stored in my room." Reid carefully lifted the USB drive with gloved fingers. "Do you know what's on this drive, Ivy?" "I plugged it into my laptop once out of curiosity," I admitted. "It's not just business records. It's a master ledger detailing Victor Sterling's entire criminal enterprise—offshore money laundering, illegal land acquisitions, bribed city officials, and human trafficking routes. My father wasn't just a victim of a loan shark. He was Victor Sterling's chief accountant for five years." Reid stared at me in shock. "Your father was laundering money for Sterling?" "Yes," I said. "Dad tried to steal two million dollars from Sterling's accounts last year to fund Jade's high-society lifestyle and keep their failing business afloat. When Sterling found out, he threatened to eliminate them all. That's why my parents offered me up—not just to pay Jade's gambling debt, but to buy Sterling's silence about the stolen money." The puzzle pieces finally snapped together with devastating clarity. My family hadn't just gotten into trouble by accident. They were active participants in a web of grand-scale corruption and crime. They had used my room to hide the evidence because they knew I never searched through my own closet, and when the walls started closing in, they decided to throw me to the wolves to save themselves. Reid immediately plugged the drive into a secure police terminal. Within minutes, federal task force alerts began flashing across his screen. "This ledger is the holy grail," Reid whispered, his eyes wide as he scanned the files. "This is enough to put Victor Sterling, your father, and their entire network behind bars for the rest of their natural lives." "Then let's use it," I said, my voice cold and unwavering. "Call Victor Sterling. Tell him I have the ledger, and I'm ready to trade."