Chapter 5 - Midnight Inventory
The backup footage loaded at 1:17 a.m.
Nobody spoke.
On screen, the boutique looked ghostly under emergency lighting.
At 12:43 one night in March, the rear door opened.
Two men entered with rolling cases.
Marc whispered, "I don't know them."
At 12:48, Charlotte appeared.
She wore jeans, a baseball cap, and no jewelry.
Antoine stared at the monitor.
"You told me you were in Lyon that weekend."
Charlotte's face hardened. "I was helping my father."
"Doing what?"
She said nothing.
On screen, Charlotte unlocked the archive cabinet and removed three numbered boxes.
The men loaded them into the cases.
At 1:02, another person entered.
Bernard Beaumont.
Antoine gripped the edge of the desk.
Amina froze the image.
Bernard was holding an old leather ledger.
Not a tablet.
Not a modern inventory sheet.
A ledger.
Its cover carried a faded gold mark.
MD/BM - 1994.
Amina stepped closer to the monitor.
For the first time, her calm cracked.
"Where did he get that?"
Antoine looked at her. "You know it?"
Amina didn't answer.
She rewound two seconds and zoomed in.
MD.
Her mother's initials.
Mariam Diallo.
Before Kora Capital.
Before Amina had money powerful people respected.
Mariam had been a patternmaker and production manager in a tiny Paris workshop.
She had died when Amina was nineteen.
Amina had been told she once worked for Beaumont and left after a dispute.
Nothing more.
She looked at Charlotte.
"That ledger belonged to my mother."
Charlotte's eyes flicked toward the door.
Amina saw it.
"Where is it?"
"I don't know."
"You carried boxes beside it."
"I said I don't know."
Antoine stepped toward his wife.
"Charlotte."
She snapped, "Ask your father."
Amina turned back to the frozen frame.
At the very bottom of the ledger, one handwritten line was visible.
FOUNDERS' SHARE REGISTER.
May you like
And beneath it, beside Mariam Diallo's name, was a number.
Thirty-five percent.
