Never Judge

"Adrianna, why did you come?" Cedric asked in a dark tone. When he had seen Adrianna in the car he was incredibly worried that she and their unborn child would get hurt. If it weren't for the tail he would have turned directly towards Mountain View for safety.

"Cedric I know you're mad, but it would be more genuine if I were the one that came to pick you up. If it was Mia or anyone else the tail would have figured something out." Adrianna had a point. If the syndicate had realized that something was off about Cedric they would stop trusting him and he would lose the chance to find out who was taking away profits from the Reyes Group.

Cedric kept quiet for the rest of the ride. He was mad at Adrianna for risking her life and the baby's life, he was mad at his staff for letting Adrianna get into the car and allowing her to do something dangerous.

When the car finally stopped at Mountain View, Adrianna held Cedric's hand before he could get off the car.

"Don't be mad at the staff or at our security team. I insisted on going, none of them would dare cross me." Adrianna explained.

Cedric's cold look softened and he hugged Adrianna, he kissed the top of her forehead and got out of the car. He then opened the door and helped her out.

"I just don't want you to get hurt." Cedric said as they entered Mountain View hand in hand.

The next day Cedric was busy working when he got a message from Martin. They were instructions for Cedric to reject a project number and to make copies to give to Martin after work. Cedric was quite surprised since that particular project was among the files recently given to him for evaluation. 

Cedric did as Martin asked and made copies of the documents before rejecting them. He then confirmed it to Martin who scheduled for them to meet in a private room quite far away from the office.

Since Cedric didn't have a car he had to take the bus to get to the restaurant. By the time he had arrived he was already fifteen minutes late for their appointment due to the traffic in the city. As he entered the room he uttered a quick apology to Martin.

"It's okay. We haven't been waiting long." Martin said as he offered Cedric the seat next to him. To Cedric's surprise it was not just him and Martin having dinner, rather there were ten other people in the room.

"Let me introduce you to everyone." Martin began as he introduced Cedric. Everyone in the room was an employee at the Reyes group. Most of them belonged to departments that worked on project partnerships or departments that approved these partnerships. Cedric took a quick mental note of who was there, and remembered to include them on his list. Cedric had no intention of catching everyone he found out to be in the syndicate yet. He wanted to find everyone and weed out every single employee that had a hand in the matter. 

"I kind of expected there would be more directors and VPs in the group." Cedric said with a nervous laugh.

"We never included any of the top honchos." Martin explained to Cedric. "Those people would die for the Reyes Group, and that's not an exaggeration. Their loyalty to the Reyes Family is at a very scary and concerning level. It's really toxic if you think about it."

"So how is it that no one has noticed what you've been doing?" Cedric was trying to figure out the pattern and the logic they had used to avoid even the best auditors and investigators at the Reyes Group.

"Simple, no pattern. We spread the rejection among us and we keep them to new ideas and partnerships so that no one could blame us for rejecting them." A female employee explained to Cedric.

"The Reyes Group gets the big fish and extremely profitable projects, and we sell to other parties those that would have worked but were never worth noticing for the Reyes Group." Martin further explained. 

"Aren't you worried that they would figure it out?" Cedric asked.

"We���ve been doing this for eight years. No one has ever asked a question. The projects are all way too small for them to care." Martin explained.

"I guess amounts like these really don't matter to the Reyes Group." Cedric said with a thoughtful look. To the members of the syndicate it seemed like he was analyzing if the risks were worth it, but in reality Cedric was thinking of how things got to this level in the past eight years. From what he knew all the employees were fairly compensated and their salaries and raises were proportional to how much the company made. "Am I the only one in my department that's a part of this?" Cedric asked.

"Yah." The female employee said. "For some reason the employees in your team are painfully loyal to the Reyes Group. They're crazy." 

"Cedric, just think of us as modern day Robin Hoods, we take from the extremely wealthy Reyes Group, and give to the smaller companies that wouldn't survive without those projects." Martin told Cedric.

Of course things were more complicated than how Martin had explained. Although it was true that the Reyes Family themselves didn't need more money and were incredibly wealthy, the employees of the Reyes Group as well as the charities that the Reyes Family supported needed the money. 

For every new project that an employee would bring in, the company usually gave that employee a bonus and many employees in some departments depended heavily on this. The bonuses and salary increases of the everyday employee were also affected by the profit that the Reyes Group managed to bring in. In reality the syndicate was not just stealing from the Reyes Family, but from every employee as well. Since all the members of the group belonged to the lower ranks they didn't understand this logic and all they could see was that they were taking from the Reyes Family.

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