The Salaryman's Soul-Sucking Contract

Chapter 12: The Art of Corporate Gaslighting

Chapter 12: The Art of Corporate Gaslighting

The mountain air felt like liquid nitrogen, but the silence crashing down on the terrace was hot enough to melt steel.

Director Santoso dropped his fork; it clattered against his porcelain plate with the sharp ring of a falling shell casing. Armand Bautista didn’t move. The Chairman’s silver head turned with agonizing slowness, his hawk-like eyes shifting from Daffa’s cold, defiant stare to his daughter’s chalk-white face.

"Clarisse?" Armand’s voice wasn't loud, but it carried the absolute, crushing weight of a falling vault door. "What is Mr. Wicaksana talking about?"

Clarisse didn’t flinch, and in that single heartbeat, Daffa saw the ghost of the Ice Queen rise from the wreckage of her panic. Her jaw tightened, the color slowly returning to her cheeks as she built the wall back up brick by brick, faster and thicker than before.

"Daffa is experiencing a severe lapse in judgment, Father," Clarisse said, her tone smooth, rhythmic, and utterly chilling. She turned her head slowly to look at him, her dark eyes flashing with a warning so intense it could have cauterized skin. "The stress of the audit, combined with the lack of sleep, is clearly affecting his cognitive stability."

Daffa let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Ah, there it is. The corporate gaslighting masterclass. Step one: discredit the witness. Step two: question his mental stability. Did you learn that in executive training, Clarisse, or is it just a family heirloom?"

"Shut up, Daffa," she hissed, the venom in her voice slipping past her polished veneer for a fraction of a second.

"Mr. Wicaksana, you are treading on very thin ice," Director Santoso sputtered, his face flushing a furious crimson. "You are an analyst—a glorified number-cruncher sitting at a table with the board of directors. You do not accuse a Vice President of corporate sabotage without ironclad proof!"

"Oh, I have proof, Director," Daffa said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the table, mirroring the Chairman's posture. He looked right at Armand. "The server logs aren't stored on the local network. They’re mirrored off-site to an encrypted cloud node in Singapore. Even if someone wipes the master drive in Jakarta, the packet trail remains. And the user ID attached to the North Kalimantan data extraction at 2:00 AM on Tuesday wasn't an anonymous ghost. It was the VP’s administrative master key."

Armand’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. He didn't look at Daffa; he kept his terrifying gaze locked entirely on his daughter. "Clarisse. Did you access the portfolio at two in the morning?"

"Of course I did," Clarisse replied instantly, her voice dangerously calm, the lie flowing from her lips like polished glass. "As the Vice President overseeing the entire acquisition, I monitor the data streams around the clock. Especially when we are dealing with hostile entities like Julian Van der Meer trying to backdoor our systems. I pulled the logs to secure them. Daffa was asleep in my guest suite. He wouldn't know the difference between a security protocol and a spreadsheet macro."

Daffa’s breath caught in his throat. Brilliant. She had flipped the narrative in three seconds flat. She had reframed her illicit midnight data-scraping not as an inside job, but as a heroic, protective measure against Julian, while simultaneously painting Daffa as an ignorant, paranoid underling who misinterpreted normal executive oversight.

"You're lying," Daffa whispered, the sheer audacity of her defense staggering him. "You didn't secure the data. You planted the backdoor so you could blame it on the North Kalimantan audit if the board started asking questions about the missing funds!"

"That is enough!" Armand slammed his palm onto the table, the wooden surface shuddering under the impact. The coffee cups rattled violently. "I have heard quite enough of this hysterical finger-pointing. Mr. Wicaksana, you are dismissed from this breakfast. Pack your things. My driver will take you back to Jakarta alone."

"Father, wait—" Clarisse started, her eyes darting toward Armand with a sudden, sharp alarm.

"No, Clarisse," Armand cut her off, his voice absolute and freezing. "You brought this stray into our inner circle. You vouched for his stability. It is entirely your responsibility to clean up the mess he has just made. But make no mistake—if those server logs show even a whisper of unauthorized tampering by morning, I won't just fire him. I will have him prosecuted under every financial fraud statute in the country."

Daffa stood up slowly. His legs felt heavy, but his mind was crystal clear. The trap had snapped, but he hadn't stayed inside it; he had blown the whole mechanism wide open.

He looked down at Clarisse. She was staring up at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly beneath her cashmere sweater. There was no warmth left in her eyes, only a dark, simmering fury and—just beneath the surface—a flicker of something that looked dangerously like regret.

"Enjoy your breakfast, Chairman," Daffa said, his voice entirely level. He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "And don't worry about my luggage. I'd rather walk down the mountain than share a car with a Bautista."

Without waiting for a response, Daffa turned on his heel and walked away from the terrace, leaving the elite predators of the financial world to pick over the bones of their own lies.

The walk back to the cabin was a blur of cold wind and burning adrenaline. Daffa packed his battered suitcases in under five minutes, throwing his clothes into the canvas bags with reckless disregard for wrinkles. He didn't care about the promotion. He didn't care about the salary bump, the bespoke suits, or the penthouse view of the Jakarta skyline. He just wanted out.

When he stepped out onto the porch, the mountain air hit him like a physical blow, but it felt good. It felt real.

A black sedan was idling at the edge of the gravel driveway, its engine purring with quiet menace. The driver—the same silent man who had moved Daffa's life into The Paradiso a week ago—stood by the rear door, holding it open with chilling indifference.

"Mr. Wicaksana," the driver said flatly. "The Chairman instructed me to take you directly to the city."

"Lead the way," Daffa muttered, tossing his bags into the trunk.

Before he could pull himself into the back seat, the heavy wooden door of the cabin swung open. Clarisse stood on the threshold. She had discarded her blazer, her white linen shirt slightly rumpled, her hair falling loosely around her shoulders. She looked less like the Ice Queen in that moment and more like a woman standing in the middle of a burning building she had set herself.

"Daffa, wait," she called out, taking a step toward the edge of the porch.

Daffa stopped, his hand resting on the door frame of the sedan. He didn't turn around fully, just glancing at her over his shoulder. "What is it, Clarisse? Did you forget to include a non-disclosure agreement for my bus ride home?"

"You shouldn't have done that," she said, her voice dropping the public polish, sounding raw and dangerously thin. "You accelerated the timeline. If you had just waited—"

"Waited for what? For you to execute Phase 2?" Daffa cut her off, turning to face her fully, his eyes blazing. "For me to take the fall for the North Kalimantan discrepancies while you and your father drank champagne on the terrace? I'm not your patsy, Clarisse. I never was."

"You don't understand how my father operates," she stepped down off the porch, closing the distance between them until she was just a few feet away. The scent of jasmine cut through the mountain wind, reminding him cruelly of the night before. "If you fight him alone, he will destroy you. Not just your career. He will ruin your family, your credit, your entire life."

"Let him try," Daffa said, his voice hard as iron. "Because the alternative was staying with you, waiting for the knife to drop while you whispered sweet nothings in my ear. At least out here in the open, I can see who’s holding the blade."

Clarisse flinched as if he had struck her physically. The silence stretched between them, thick with unsaid words, broken promises, and the wreckage of a lie that had grown too heavy to sustain.

"I didn't want it to end like this," she whispered, her dark eyes searching his face as if looking for the man who had held her in the dark just hours earlier.

"Then you shouldn't have written the script," Daffa replied coldly.

He climbed into the back of the sedan and pulled the heavy door shut. The automatic locks clicked into place with a definitive, metallic thud.

Through the tinted glass, he watched Clarisse standing alone on the gravel driveway, the mountain wind whipping her hair across her face. She didn't look away as the car reversed and turned down the winding mountain pass. She just stood there, unmoving, until she vanished entirely from the rearview mirror.

Daffa leaned his head back against the leather seat, closing his eyes as the city lights of Jakarta began to rise on the horizon like a glowing digital trap waiting to be beaten.