"Elena." Jackson moved closer to her desk. His voice dropped low. "Stop looking into the Castellano account."
"But this is illegal. Someone needs to report it."
"Everyone who asks questions about Castellano tends to have accidents." He held her gaze. "Bad luck. Terrible timing. You understand what I'm saying?"
Elena's hands went cold. "Are you threatening me?"
"I'm trying to help you. Go home. Delete whatever notes you made. Come in Monday and work on your actual assignments." He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the handle. "I mean it, Elena. Leave this alone."
The door clicked shut behind him. Elena sat frozen in her chair. Her heart was beating too fast. Jackson was not the kind of person who made dramatic warnings. He was boring and practical and the fact that he just told her to stop investigating meant something very bad was happening at this company.
She should listen. She should pack up and go home and pretend she never saw anything.
Elena pulled out her phone and started photographing her computer screen. Every file. Every document. Every piece of evidence she could find showing that Meridian Marketing had been stealing proprietary information from Castellano Technologies and selling it to their competitors. Her hands shook as she took the pictures but she kept going until she had dozens of images saved to her cloud storage.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Michelle.
Mom's asking for you. Can you come by the hospital this weekend?
Elena typed back quickly. Working late tonight but I'll come Sunday. Promise. Love you.
She hit send and looked at the message for a long moment. Her mom had maybe three months left. The cancer was eating through her too fast for the treatments to keep up. Elena needed to spend more time with her. After this weekend she would take time off work. She would be there.
Elena grabbed her coat and purse. The office was completely empty now. Her footsteps echoed in the hallway as she walked to the elevator. Every shadow felt wrong. Every corner looked like someone might be hiding there waiting for her. She pressed the elevator button three times even though she knew it would not make it come faster.
The parking garage was mostly empty when she got to her car. She clicked the unlock button and the lights flashed. As she reached for the door handle she noticed a dark sedan three spaces down with its engine running. Nobody was in the driver's seat but exhaust poured from the tailpipe.
Elena got in her car and locked the doors immediately. She started the engine and pulled out fast. The sedan did not follow her. By the time she was on the street she felt stupid for panicking. "Exhaustion is making me paranoid."
Downtown Seattle was busy with Friday night traffic. Elena stopped at a red light and checked her phone again. Michelle had sent a photo of their mother in the hospital bed looking small and tired. Elena's throat tightened. She needed to stop making excuses.
The light turned green. Elena put her phone in the cup holder and pressed the gas pedal.
The delivery truck came from her left.
She saw it for maybe half a second. The driver was not slowing down. He was not stopping. He was running the red light at full speed and there was nothing at all she could do!
Elena yanked the steering wheel. Her foot slammed the brake. The truck hit her car on the driver's side.
"ARGHHHHH," she screamed.
Metal shrieked. Glass exploded. The car spun and Elena's head cracked against the steering despite the airbag. Pain shot through her entire body. She could not breathe. Something was crushing her ribs. Blood filled her mouth.
The car stopped moving. Elena tried to inhale but her chest would not expand. People were shouting outside but their voices sounded far away and distorted. She blinked but her vision was going dark at the edges.
This could not be happening. She was thirty two years old. She had things to do. Her mother was dying and needed her. Michelle was waiting for her to show up on Sunday. She had not finished the investigation. She had not reported what she found.
The darkness spread faster. Elena fought to stay conscious but her body was shutting down. Her lungs would not work. Her heart was beating wrong. Everything hurt and then suddenly nothing hurt at all.
She thought about her mother one more time. She thought about all the visits she kept postponing because she could not handle watching cancer destroy the woman who raised her.
Elena tried to hold on. She tried to force her eyes to stay open. She tried to make her heart keep beating through sheer willpower.
But the darkness did not care what she wanted. It swallowed her whole.
The pain stopped. The sounds stopped. The feeling of her broken body stopped.
Elena Martinez died at the intersection of Fifth and Pine in downtown Seattle at nine thirty seven on a Friday night in November. The delivery truck driver would later tell police his brakes failed. Investigators would find cut brake lines. Nobody would ever be charged.
But in the space between her last heartbeat and complete nothing, Elena's consciousness did not disappear. It floated. It drifted. It searched desperately for something to hold onto because some part of her refused to simply stop existing.
Three hundred miles south in a private hospital in San Francisco, Victoria Castellano's heart stopped for the third time. Doctors shocked her with the paddles. Nurses pumped her chest. Machines screamed warnings. A baby had just been delivered but the mother was dying and nobody could figure out why.
Elena's consciousness found that dying body and grabbed hold.