Chapter 5 - The Hidden Ledger
By dawn, the mansion was eerily quiet, but the psychological storm raged on. Clara knew she couldn't stay hidden forever. Driven by a newfound resolve, she slipped out of her room and made her way down to the underground archives—a restricted vault where historical financial records and personal journals of the Vance family were kept. The air down there was damp and smelled of old paper and dust. Using a master key code Arthur had covertly slipped into her pocket earlier, she unlocked the primary filing cabinet. Page after page revealed a dark history of payoffs, silenced scandals, and covered-up assaults spanning decades. Then, she found it: a specialized ledger marked with Julian’s initials, detailing payments made to external fixers and tracking the movements of vulnerable employees. A cold sweat broke out on the back of her neck as she heard heavy footsteps approaching the vault door. She frantically flipped through the pages to find definitive proof, but the footsteps stopped right outside. The heavy iron door began to creak open, revealing the silhouette of someone holding a heavy metal pipe. Clara ducked behind a tall mahogany shelving unit, holding her breath as the shadow entered the aisle, searching blindly in the dark.
