WEB OF LIES Novel Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

GATSHA

He stands by the window of the executive office, watching the truck fleet. For three months, he has lived in a state of high-alert maintenance. The depot is running like a Swiss watch, but the effort it takes to keep it that way, while simultaneously scrubbing the past has turned his life into a series of calculated performances.

He has spent these ninety days playing the role of the grieving, loyal partner to perfection. On the surface, he is the savior of Nhlapho Logistics. Behind the scenes, he has been a ghost in the machine. He hired a specialist to remotely wipe Funani’s cloud servers and scrub the internal server logs of any communication that happened in those final forty-eight hours.

Every trace of the Mauritian lie has been backed up with forged invoices and dummy emails, creating a paper trail that leads to nowhere.

The guilt of Funani’s death is still there, but he has become an expert at sweeping it under the carpet. He treats the memory of his friend like a closed file in a basement; he knows it’s there, but he simply chooses not to open it. He tells himself that the accident was a tragedy born of necessity, a path to a throne that was always meant to be his.

Personally, he is lonelier than he cares to admit. Zenzele has become nothing more than a voice on the phone. His life is this office, the sound of the engines, and the weight of the secrets he carries. He has stayed in contact with Hlengiwe via text, sending her brief professional updates that always end with a gentle “take your time, the business is safe.” He wants her to feel secure, dependent, and most importantly, to stay away until he has finished cleaning the house.

He returns to his desk and sits, checking his watch. The silence from Cape Town has been longer than usual this week. He assumes she’s still walking the beach, lost in her thoughts, slowly fading into the background of the company.

The office door swings open without a knock or warning from the receptionist. He looks up and sees Hlengiwe walk in. She doesn’t look like the broken woman who left three months ago. The black mourning dresses are gone. She is wearing a power suit that fits her perfectly, with high quality hair. She looks like the woman who used to run the boardroom before she became a housewife. She looks like a woman who has found her feet and is ready to walk all over anyone in her way.

“Gatsha, hello.” she says, her voice smooth and confident. She walks to the center of the room and drops her bag onto the visitor’s chair. “I hope you haven’t made yourself too comfortable in that chair.”

He stands up, his mouth slightly open before he catches himself. He forces a smile, but his mind is already recalculating every move he has made in her absence.

“Hlengiwe,” he says,”We weren’t expecting you until next month. How has it been?”

“The house in Cape Town was exactly what I needed.” she says. “The therapy was a bit of a challenge at first, talking to a stranger about your life isn’t easy but it helped me find my center again. I spent hours walking along the Atlantic, just listening to the waves and hitting the gym hard. It gives you a perspective that the noise of Johannesburg takes away.”

He leans back, his hands wrapped behind his head as he studies her. “I’m glad to hear that. You look good, I can tell going back to the gym did you good. I honestly didn’t think you’d be ready to face this place so soon.”

“I can’t hide forever,” she replies with a small smile. “At some point, you have to stop mourning the life you had and start living the one you’re left with. I feel ready.”

He smiles back, “Well, welcome back home. The depot hasn’t been the same without you checking the flower arrangements in the lobby.”

Hlengiwe chuckles, “Thabile has been sending me the weekly reports, and she seems incredibly impressed with the way you’ve handled the transition. She says the drivers are disciplined and the overheads are down. You’ve done a remarkable job, Gatsha. Funani always said you were the engine that kept this place running while he was the steering wheel.”

He feels his chest tightens slightly, the compliment hits his ego exactly where it lives. He’s spent his life being the engine and hearing it acknowledged by the owner herself tastes sweet. “I just didn’t want anything to slip. I promised him I’d look after things.”

“And the latest?” she asks, her tone turning slightly more professional. “Those people, the ones from Mauritius? Is that still a shadow we’re living under?”

He waves a hand dismissively, “That one is sorted. I managed to renegotiate the terms of that old deposit through a third-party mediator. We paid a small exit fee, but they’ve backed off. There’s no need for you to worry about them anymore.”

Hlengiwe nods slowly, her expression unreadable behind a mask of calm. “That’s good to hear. I’d hate for my first week back to be spent looking over my shoulder.”

He reaches for a thick blue file on his desk and slides it toward her. This is his play, the thing that will show her he’s not just maintaining the business, but growing it.

“Actually, since you’re here and feeling ready, I want you to look at this,” he says, “It’s a new contract, a big one. A copper mining group from the DRC is looking for a primary logistics partner to move ore from the border down to the Durban port. It’s a five-year deal that would double our current fleet requirements and put us in a different league entirely.”

Hlengiwe opens the file, her eyes scanning the complex terms and the projected revenue figures.

“This is ambitious, Gatsha,” she says, her thumb tracing the edge of the paper.

“It’s the future,” he replies, leaning in. “But it’s a two-person job. I’ve handled the ground work, but I need you for the high-level negotiations. It’s the perfect way for you to step back into the light.”

Hlengiwe looks up from the paper, her eyes meeting his. “Then I suppose we have a lot of work to do.”

HLENGIWE

She pushes the heavy front door open, after a long day at the depot. The silence of the mansion rushes to greet her. She drops her keys on the table and slowly kicks off her heels, her bare feet finding relief on the cool tiles.

“Home sweet home.” She says as she wanders around the kitchen. He bags are still in the car, she drove straight to the office from the office.

She pours herself a large glass of red wine, and makes her way to the staircase. She sinks onto the bottom step, pulling her knees to her chest.

From this point, she looks toward the dining room and remembers Funani’s booming laugh during their first Christmas here, the way he had insisted on making the turkey himself despite knowing nothing about it. She looks toward the lounge and sees him sitting in his favorite wingback chair, his reading glasses perched on his nose as he watched the news.

“You have to separate the memory from the pain, Hlengiwe,” her therapist’s voice echoes in her mind.

In Cape Town, those sessions had been her lifeline. She had spent weeks learning how to breathe through the waves of grief, how to stop her hands from shaking when she heard a car brake too suddenly. She had told the doctor she felt ready to come back, but sitting here now, the air feels thin. The house is too big for one person, especially when it was supposed to be filled with the sounds of a nursery.

Her phone vibrates on the step beside her, the screen lighting up with an unsaved number. She clears her throat, wiping a stray tear before answering.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” the voice on the other end is the tech specialist she had hired through a private contact. “I’ve managed to crack the secondary encryption on the cloud account. It took longer than expected; someone did a professional job of trying to keep people out.”

She sits up straight, her grip tightening on her wine glass. “And? What did you find?”

“That’s the thing,” the expert says, the sound of keyboard tapping audible in the background. “The account is mostly intact, but there’s a surgical hole in the data. Every email, every sent text, and the entire GPS and call log history for the forty-eight hours leading up to the accident is gone. It wasn’t a glitch but it was manually scrubbed from the server-side.”

The Mauritian story Gatsha told her flashes through her mind. If Funani had been so scared for her safety, why would he delete the evidence that could help her? He wouldn’t. But someone who wanted to hide their tracks certainly would.

She realizes then that she is playing a game with people who have already moved their pieces. If she confronts Gatsha now, he will simply tell her another lie. She takes a slow sip of her wine. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. He will get sloppy. She won’t fight him for the chair; she will sit beside him until he hands her the knife himself.

“Thank you,” she says into the phone, “Send everything you recovered to my private drive. I want to see exactly where the gaps begin.”

NARRATED

Thabile sits at a dimly lit, high-end wine bar in Sandton. She has untied her hair, letting the curls fall over her shoulders, and her professional blazer is draped over the back of the stool.

The door opens and Gatsha walks in. He looks tired, his tie loosened, but the sight of him makes her heart dance. She remembers the night it happened, three weeks ago, late at the office. The tension of the constant legal dealings had snapped.

It was once off but it’s all she could think of, he gave it to her so good that all the suspicion she had about him disappeared, all she thinks about now is him buried inside her. She has been creating opportunities for that to happen again but Gatsha seems to be over it.

Gatsha sits on the stool next to her, but he doesn’t look at her with the same hunger. He looks at his watch.

“You said it was urgent, I’m here.” he says, his voice cold and distant.

“Can’t a woman invite a business associate for a drink without it being a crisis?” she asks, her voice dropping into a playful, sultry mode. She leans in, her shoulder brushing his. “I was just thinking about that new compliance filing. I was thinking about how quiet the office gets after seven. Do you remember how quiet it was that Tuesday night? I found a brand of Scotch you might like. We could head back there, or to my place, and I could give you a private tasting.”

Gatsha doesn’t smile but stares at the row of bottles behind the bar. “I don’t have time for Scotch, Thabile. I have a depot to run.”

“Oh, come on, Gatsha,” she giggles, tracing her glass. “You’ve been working so hard and earned a night off. I even saw that a new Italian place opened up around the corner. We could grab a bite, talk about… well, anything but logistics.'”

Gatsha finally turns to her, “Hlengiwe is back.”

The smile on Thabile’s face vanishes. Her hand stops moving on the glass.

“She returned today,” Gatsha continues.

Thabile stares at him, her eyes narrowing. The lust is still there, but a bitter streak of jealousy begins to twist in her stomach.

Hlengiwe is a wonderful woman and she has been doing her job well as per Funani’s instructions on that will before he passed on. But she is a lady with needs and has taken a liking to Gatsha and can’t help but feel like Gatsha likes Hlengiwe. She looks at her wine, her jaw tightening.

“I know,” she whispers.

Gatsha frowns. “You know what?”

Thabile takes a long, slow sip of her wine, “I know everything I need to know, Gatsha.”

To be continued

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