“What?”

“What?”

“May I see your phone?”

I hesitated.

“My screen is cracked.”

“I’m not judging your screen.”

I handed it over.

Marcus asked me to repeat the German statements while he recorded them.

Then he asked for times.

Table positions.

Who spoke.

Who looked at whom.

What Victor translated afterward.

He questioned me harder than my university professors ever had.

I answered everything.

Finally, Ethan said, “Get an independent interpreter.”

Marcus nodded.

“Embassy?”

“Someone Victor doesn’t know.”

“And the contract?”

“Nothing gets signed.”

Marcus looked toward the hotel.

“If Lang is involved, he’ll notice a delay.”

Ethan buttoned his jacket.

“Then don’t give him one.”

That was when I understood his plan.

He wasn’t going to confront Victor.

He was going back upstairs and pretending he knew nothing.

My stomach flipped.

“You’re going back in there?”

“Yes.”

“With him?”

“Yes.”

“That seems insane.”

Marcus almost smiled.

Ethan didn’t.

“I built a company by letting dishonest people talk longer than they should.”

Then he looked at me.

“Tonight, Victor gets all the time he wants.”

I should have returned to the kitchen.

I should have finished my shift, caught the U-Bahn home, microwaved soup for Mom, and pretended I had never heard words like accident or payment.

Instead Ethan told Marcus to keep me nearby.

Forty minutes later, an independent interpreter named Elena Ruiz arrived through the service entrance with credentials from the U.S. Embassy.

She listened to my account.

Then she listened to a secure audio feed from the conference room.

Within four minutes, she looked at Ethan.

“He’s lying.”

Not making mistakes.

Lying.

Victor changed percentages.

Deleted protections.

Inserted penalties nobody had stated.

He even translated a request for a forty-eight-hour legal review as pressure to sign immediately.

Ethan sat completely still.

Then Herr Brenner leaned toward another executive and whispered in German.

“Once the American signs, Lang gets the second payment.”

Elena translated softly.

Victor smiled across the room.

Then told Ethan, “He says they appreciate your confidence in the partnership.”

Ethan closed his pen.

That tiny click changed the atmosphere.

But the worst part came twenty minutes later.

Marcus received a message from his team.

A black Mercedes assigned to take Ethan to the airport the next morning had been switched without authorization.

The replacement booking had been made using credentials belonging to Ethan’s travel office.

And someone had specifically requested a driver not normally contracted by the company.

Marcus showed him the screen.

Ethan’s face finally changed.

Not fear.

Something colder.

“Freeze the signing,” Marcus said.

Ethan shook his head.

“No.”

I stared at him.

“What?”

He looked toward Victor through the glass.

“We freeze everything after we know who else is involved.”

Then his eyes came back to me.

“Anna, from this point forward, you do exactly what Marcus tells you.”

I nodded.

I didn’t understand why until forty minutes later, when the hotel’s security manager pulled footage from the employee corridor.

Victor Lang appeared on camera.

He looked both ways.

Then he used a stolen staff access card to enter the hallway leading to my locker.

That was when this stopped being Ethan Carter’s problem.

Victor had decided I was part of it now.

And he was coming for me.

PART 2 — Victor targeted me after realizing someone had exposed his lies.

At 8:17 p.m., Marcus locked the staff office door behind us.

“Victor knows,” I said.

“We don’t know that.”

“He went to my locker.”

“That tells us he’s worried.”

“That’s a very expensive way to say he knows.”

Marcus gave me a look.

I sat on a folding chair beside boxes of napkins and industrial dishwasher detergent.

Very glamorous.

My manager, Petra, kept texting.

WHERE ARE YOU?

TABLE 6 NEEDS WATER.

Then:

ANNA THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.

Apparently international murder plots did not excuse poor beverage service.

Marcus’s phone buzzed.

Security had searched my locker.

Inside my tote bag they found a USB drive I had never seen before.

It contained confidential Carter Energy files.

I stared at the screen.

“He planted it.”

“That’s what the video suggests.”

“Suggests?”

Marcus turned his laptop around.

The footage showed Victor entering the employee corridor at 7:43.

At 7:45, he stepped directly toward my locker.

At 7:47, he left.

No ambiguity.

No accidental wrong hallway.

He had come for me.

Then Ethan walked in.

He had removed his tie.

That somehow made him look more dangerous.

“Victor just told my lawyers,” he said, “that he suspects hotel staff stole proprietary documents.”

I laughed once.

Hard.

“He’s framing me before I can speak.”

“Yes.”

My hands stopped shaking.

Funny thing about fear.

Sometimes it burns itself out.

“What do you need me to do?”

Ethan looked at Marcus.

Marcus looked unhappy.