The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 15
The boss returned to his place full of suspicion and second-guessing. It was not a small property.
It had once been a derelict factory. He had bought it cheap and turned it into his base.
There was a yard, a two-story building where he lived, and another four-story building where the newsboys stayed.
There was also a warehouse, piled with unsold newspapers and recyclable trash the boys had picked up off the streets.
Yes, the newsboys were out on the streets selling papers in the mornings and evenings, but where did they go the rest of the time?
Men like the boss were, at their core, low-level businessmen. They were still making profit through squeezing and exploiting people. They would not waste a single minute of the newsboys’ time, so during the rest of the day the boys were out scavenging garbage.
In some neighborhoods there were even rumors about child thieves breaking into houses. In any case, they were never allowed a moment’s peace, except the girls, and the hours when they were sleeping at night.
In the warehouse, the boss found those five newsboys. They looked miserable.
Every one of them wore the same expression of fear and pain. Losing more than two thousand dollars of the boss’s money had terrified them. But they themselves did not know where the problem had happened.
The moment they saw the boss return without a smile on his face, they understood at once that he had not gotten the result he wanted. That was a terrifying realization. It meant they might keep getting beaten.
The youngest had already wet himself once. Now he did it again. Moisture trickled down his leg in little drips. These children, physically, mentally, emotionally, had all reached their limit.
The boss stared at them with a dark expression. There was none of the fear he had shown in front of Michael, none of the strange unease he had felt alone in the room with William. On his face there was only the viciousness of a man in control, and something meaner besides.
“Tell me, after you left that house, who else did you see? What happened? This concerns what happens to you next, so think very carefully before you answer!” He stood there with a whip in his hand, watching them, and the sight of it made their skin crawl.
They widened their eyes and exchanged frantic looks. The oldest seemed to catch something in the boss’s words. He blurted out at once, “We went to see Mr. Michael...”
According to the boy’s account, when they went to see Mr. Michael, they had hung their leather satchels on the hooks by the room entrance first, to show how polite they were, and only then gone to see him.
If something had gone wrong with the money, then that was where it had happened.
To these children, it no longer mattered who had actually taken the money. What mattered was finding someone else to bite first, so they could escape the horror hanging over them.
Once one of them started talking, the others immediately piled on, building on his words. In an instant, Michael’s suspicion grew larger and larger.
It fit very neatly with what the boss wanted to believe.
He did not believe William, that young punk, could have swallowed that money. It had been counted twice in front of several pairs of eyes. It should not have gone wrong, and he did not want to believe William was capable of pulling it off.
Because if he believed that, then he would have to admit he was not as good as William. Men like the boss could accept being beneath someone like Michael, but they would never admit they were worse than some broke kid like William.
And in the deepest part of his mind, he already believed that if something had gone wrong, it must have happened with Michael. That was why the first person he had gone looking for after discovering the problem was Michael. He believed Michael had taken the money.
The relationship between the two of them was not a simple partnership. Michael held his weakness in his hands. He was obviously the weaker party. If anything happened, he would naturally assume Michael had done it. It was a kind of buried, persecuted instinct.
What William had said only made that feeling stronger. Going to William for the money had, in large part, been an attempt to seek out the comfort of shared victimhood. It made him feel less alone.
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