Chapter 223: 223. She Told Me A Story About Academic Fraud And I Filed It Under ’Relatable’
"There was a student," she began, her gaze drifting toward the window, looking past the street traffic toward something only she could see. "About four years ago."
"It was near the end of my postgraduate work in Berlin..."
"A student in my research group had falsified data in a paper that was on the verge of being published."
"It wasn’t massive, systemic fraud, but it was real... It was the kind of lie that would have ended his career and likely the careers of two other people in the group who had done nothing wrong but whose names were tied to the paper."
"You were the one who caught it," Mike said. It wasn’t a question.
"I caught it because it was my job to check the data for the final draft," she said, her voice tightening slightly. "And suddenly, the academic world became very small."
"I had a choice... I could report it—the ’correct’ procedural move, which would have destroyed three careers, two of which were innocent."
"Or, I could fix it quietly... I could redo the analysis with the actual data, which I was capable of doing because the methodology was sound, and then bury the original version forever."
"You buried it," Mike said.
"I buried it," she confirmed. "The corrected version held up..."
"The paper got published with the real numbers..."
"The conclusions were slightly weaker than the falsified ones, but they were still defensible..."
"Nobody noticed. For a long time, I told myself that was the end of it... That the world was just a little more honest because of a lie."
"But it wasn’t the end."
"No," she said, her eyes snapping back to his, sharp and intense. "Because falsifying research to fix a lie is still a violation."
"And the original fraudster... he eventually figured out what I’d done..."
"He wasn’t grateful, Mike... He was furious. He felt like I had stolen his ’work’ and altered it without his permission."
"It was an insane, arrogant way to think, but that was his reality."
"What was his move?"
"He threatened to expose me," she said, her voice dropping. "Not what he had done, but what I had done to fix it."
"He knew that the optics of a researcher secretly altering a student’s published data would be devastating for me, regardless of my intentions..."
"He held my reputation in his hands."
"And that’s when the Phoenix stepped in," Mike said.
"That’s when the Phoenix stepped in," she confirmed. "The student eventually finished his degree and drifted into the exact kind of financial chaos the phoenix specializes in."
"While they were digging into his mess to find leverage, they found the thread he was holding over me."
And Bruce, being a strategist, realized that the leverage they had on a failing student would be far more valuable if used against a rising star.
"He saw that the student was about to be a nobody, while I was on the verge of a junior lectureship at Valcrest."
"So Bruce made you an offer."
"He approached me very politely," she said, a trace of bitterness in her tone. "He told me he could make the entire problem disappear."
"The fraud, the correction, the threat—all of it—scrubbed so clean it would be as if it never happened."
"In exchange, he didn’t want money... He wanted information."
"Not high-level espionage, just... awareness. He wanted someone on the inside of the university who could see the shifts in the wind before they became storms."
"And you said yes."
"I said yes," she said, her gaze unwavering, her voice hard and pragmatic. "Because the alternative was spending my entire career looking over my shoulder, waiting for a man who had nothing to destroy everything I had built."
"Bruce offered me a way to be truly untouchable."
Mike remained silent for a long beat, letting the weight of her confession settle between them. He didn’t offer a sympathetic nod or a reassuring smile; he knew she would have rejected both. Instead, he just looked at her, seeing the architecture of her life for what it actually was.
"You didn’t go to the Phoenix because you were weak," he said, his voice low and steady, cutting through the ambient noise of the café. "You went because you were protecting something."
"The same thing you were protecting when you fixed that data in Berlin..."
"You weren’t looking for a master; you were looking for a shield."
Sabrina stared at him.
She didn’t respond immediately. Mike watched the specific, sudden stillness that came over her, the kind of stillness that belongs to someone who has been braced for a specific impact.
She had likely spent the last three years preparing for judgment, or perhaps pity, or the careful, neutral nonreaction of someone trying to be polite about a scandal. She had been ready to defend herself against all of it.
But Mike hadn’t given her any of those things. He had given her a mirror, and she didn’t quite know what to do with the gap where her expected defenses should have been.
"Nobody has ever put it quite like that before," she said finally, her voice a fraction thinner than it had been.
"Most people wouldn’t," Mike said. "Most people would hear the words ’gang’ or ’criminal organization,’ and their brains would stop processing anything meaningful after that."
"They like the labels. And labels are easy."
"And you didn’t stop processing," she noted, her eyes searching his, trying to find the catch.
"I don’t usually," he replied.
She looked down at her coffee. The steam had long since stopped rising; the liquid was still, reflecting the overhead lights of the café.
She hadn’t touched it in several minutes. She seemed to be gathering herself, pulling the professional mask back into place, but there was a new tension in her shoulders, a sense that the conversation had moved past the point of no return.
"May I ask you something?" she said, her gaze snapping back to his, sharper now, more predatory. "And can you actually answer it?"
"Not the version that sounds good in a debriefing, or the version that fits the role you’ve negotiated for yourself... The real one."
"You can ask," Mike said.
He leaned back slightly, giving her the space to strike. "I make no promises about which version you’ll get, but you can ask."
"Why are you actually interested in this version?" she asked, the question landing heavily on the table. "The Phoenix..."
"You didn’t just stumble into their orbit, Mike."
"You walked in, you beat Bruce at his own game in front of his own people, and you negotiated yourself a position with genuine authority in less than twenty-four hours."
"That isn’t the behavior of someone looking for a paycheck or a way to hide."
"You clearly don’t need the money, and you definitely don’t need the protection."
She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. "So what is it? What are you actually hunting for?"
"What do you think it is, then?" Mike challenged.
He wanted to see her theory. He wanted to see how much of his personality she had already mapped out.
"I think," she said, her voice dropping to a slow, deliberate cadence, "that you are someone who has spent his entire life moving through structures."
"You’ve mastered the rules of the university, the rules of the streets, and the rules of the people in power."
"And at a certain point, Mike, that mastery becomes its own kind of hunger..."
"It’s not about the money, and it’s not about the safety..."
"It’s about the structure itself."
"You want to see if you can hold the lever and you want to see if you can be the one who decides how the machine moves."
