Story code: ST-001341
Part 2: The False Bottom
The screen remained mostly black, dominated by the pale, flattened flesh of the man’s palm pressed against the glass lens. Chloe’s breath hitched, snagging in her throat as she gripped the yellow plastic handle of the box cutter. She backed away from the wall monitor, her bare feet silent against the hardwood. The quiet in the apartment was deafening, broken only by the erratic, heavy thud of her own pulse.
A sharp, flat-palmed strike rattled the heavy oak of her front door. It wasn’t a normal knock. It was a demand.
“Chloe,” a muffled, distorted voice carried through the wood. “We know the feed dropped. We know you saw it.”
A chill radiated down her spine, freezing the blood in her veins. How could he know? The stream had crashed barely three minutes ago. He must have been sitting in a car outside, watching the broadcast live, waiting for her to open the crate on camera.
“Do not make this complicated,” the voice warned.
She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. Her eyes darted to the deadbolt, confirming it was turned vertically, locked in place.
A rustling sound came from the threshold. A long, thick manila envelope slid underneath the door, scraping against the floorboards. On the monitor, the large palm finally pulled away from the lens. The camera auto-adjusted to the hallway lighting, capturing the back of a man in a shapeless dark windbreaker as he walked briskly toward the stairwell, never turning his face toward the lens.
Chloe waited until the hallway motion sensor clicked off, plunging the corridor back into darkness. Only then did she step forward and snatch the envelope from the floor. It was heavy. She tore the paper flap open, dumping the contents onto her quartz kitchen island. A thick stack of glossy photographs spilled out, along with a cheap, black burner phone.
She picked up the top photo. It was a wide shot of a massive, poorly lit warehouse. Rows of sewing machines stretched into the gloom, manned by hunched figures. But it wasn’t the pristine, white-walled, solar-powered facility in Portugal she had toured and heavily promoted to her audience. This was a crumbling, windowless sweatshop. The next photo was a close-up of a production line. Piles of her signature vegan leather lay on stained concrete floors, surrounded by dark, pooling liquid that looked terrifyingly like the crust baked into her prototype.
Her personal iPhone, sitting on the counter next to the sink, erupted with a shrill ringtone. The screen flashed with a FaceTime request from Elias, the lead partner of her investor syndicate.
She stared at his smiling contact photo, panic rising in her chest. She had just texted her team that a catastrophic router failure had killed her internet. If she answered a video call, she would prove she had cellular data. If she ignored it, Elias-who had leveraged two million dollars on this exact launch hour-might pull the funding before midnight.
Her phone buzzed with a text from him: *Answer the FaceTime over cellular right now, or we freeze the accounts. I need to see the bag to assure the board.*
She had less than thirty seconds. Chloe sprinted to her office closet, throwing open the doors and tearing through the canvas dust bags storing her early test runs. She needed a decoy. She snatched a Version 1 prototype. It was the same ivory color, but it lacked the reinforced gussets and the custom polished hardware of the final product. It was a glaringly inferior fake to anyone who knew what to look for, but it was all she had.
She raced back to her desk, swept the bloody prototype onto the floor, and kicked it deep under her chair. She angled her desk lamp away to create heavy shadows, messing up her hair slightly to sell the panic of a power outage, and hit accept on the FaceTime call.
Elias’s sharp, unamused face filled the screen. He was sitting in the back of a town car. “Chloe. What the hell is going on? The chat is panicking. People are asking if it was a PR stunt.”
“Elias, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, forcing her voice to shake with manufactured stress rather than actual terror. “A transformer blew outside. It fried my router and my main ring light. I’m on a battery lamp.”
“Show me the bag,” Elias demanded, his eyes narrowing. “The syndicate is watching this feed. Hold it up.”
Chloe swallowed the bile rising in her throat. She lifted the V1 prototype into the dim edge of the webcam’s view, keeping the inferior stitching facing away. She subtly shook her hands, blurring the camera’s focus.
“The hardware,” Elias said, leaning closer to his phone camera. “It looks matte. The final specs were polished silver.”
“It’s just the terrible lighting,” she lied smoothly, her survival instinct overriding her panic. “There’s no overhead light to reflect off it.”
Elias stared at her for five agonizing seconds. “Fine. But I don’t like being blind. I’m ten minutes from your building. I’m coming up to see it in person and we’ll tether your laptop to my hotspot to resume the stream.”
“Elias, wait-”
The call disconnected.
Chloe dropped her phone onto the desk. Ten minutes. She had ten minutes to hide the ruined prototype, clean up the artificial snow, and deal with the cut shipping crate.
She dropped to her knees beside the crate to shove the loose packaging back inside. Her hands brushed against the second hidden bundle she had carved out of the false bottom. The heavy industrial plastic was still wrapped tight. The coppery smell was overpowering now, filling the small room with the undeniable stench of an abattoir.
She couldn’t throw it away without knowing what leverage they had on her. She grabbed the box cutter and slashed through the heavy-duty tape.
The plastic fell open. Chloe let out a choked gasp, scrambling backward until her spine hit the leg of her desk.
It wasn’t a piece of the factory line. It was a thick stack of foreign passports and plastic employee identification cards, all bound tightly together with heavy black zip ties. They were smeared and caked in the same thick, dried reddish-brown blood that stained her bag. The top ID card featured a small portrait of a young girl, her face partially obscured by a dark, rusted thumbprint. The country code on the passport was from a region notoriously blacklisted by international labor watchdogs-a region she had staked her entire brand reputation on avoiding.
On the kitchen counter, the cheap black burner phone suddenly chimed.
Chloe forced herself to stand on trembling legs, crossing the room to read the glowing green screen.
*Stream goes back up in ten minutes. You smile, you pitch the bag, you secure the pre-orders. If you don’t, we send the real photos to the press. Don’t worry, your investor is on his way to help you reconnect.*
The wall monitor for the front door chimed. Three sharp bursts.
Chloe turned slowly. Elias was standing on her porch, glaring into the camera, waiting for her to let him in.