The Zug Transfer

The transfer request sat in my inbox for three days before I touched it.

Forty-two million euro, routed through a shell company in Zug, traceable back to Voss Logistik's Hamburg depot — the same depot whose audit memos Sophie was currently dissecting in her flat in Kreuzberg. One click and Elara's embezzlement would be front-page news by Friday. I'd spent two lifetimes waiting for this moment.

I closed the laptop.

"Wrong move," Matthias said from the doorway of my office. He was holding two coffees, his beard flecked with sawdust from the workshop downstairs. "You've got the knife. Use it."

"If I leak it now, it's just revenge. And revenge doesn't build anything." I took the cup. "Vireo needs to be real before I tear her down. Otherwise I'm just the bitter brother who couldn't compete."

Matthias studied me for a long moment, then set his coffee down and pulled up the spare chair. "Then we build. Properly. Who do you need?"

"A team. Six people, no more. And I want the engineer from the TU demo last month — Lena Ostrowski. She wrote the compression algorithm I've been trying to reverse-engineer for weeks."

"She's twenty-three."

"She's brilliant. That's the only qualification that matters."

He laughed, that low rumble that made the whole room feel steadier. "Your father would've hated that."

"My father hired people for their surnames." I rolled my shoulders, feeling the old weight settle and lift. "I'm not him."

---

Lena arrived on a Tuesday, three days after I sent the offer. She was small and sharp-featured, with a buzzcut and a leather jacket that had seen better decades, and she spent the first hour walking the empty floor of the Prenzlauer Berg loft without saying a word.

"It's a warehouse," she said finally.

"It's a blank canvas."

"It smells like a warehouse."

"It'll smell like a server farm by spring." I handed her a contract. "Read it properly. If there's anything you want changed, we change it."

She read it properly. It took forty minutes. She changed two clauses. I signed.

By the end of January we had six people and a working prototype — a middleware layer that let small logistics firms share freight capacity the way ride-hailing apps shared cars. Matthias ran operations. Lena ran engineering. I ran everything else, which meant I slept four hours a night and answered emails at 03:00 like a man possessed.

It was the happiest I'd been in either life.

Then Matthias came into my office on a grey Thursday morning with a printout and a face like a closing door.

"Elara's been talking," he said. "To the Handelsblatt. To two logistics newsletters. To anyone who'll listen."

I read the printout. *Vireo Technologies: The Phantom Start-Up.* The article was careful, almost elegant in its venom — no outright accusations, just questions. Where was Vireo's funding coming from? Why wouldn't the founders disclose their backers? Was it true that the company had no audited accounts?

"Someone's feeding her numbers," I said. "Our burn rate. Our headcount. She knows we're small."

"She's framing it as a shell game. Investors are getting nervous." Matthias folded his arms. "This is what she does, Kieran. She doesn't attack you. She makes everyone else afraid to stand next to you."

I stared at the article for a long time. In my first life I'd responded to something like this by going to ground, by trying to out-lawyer her, by letting the rumours calcify into fact. I'd lost three investors that way. I'd lost more than that.

"Get me the accounts," I said. "All of them. Every invoice, every payment, every contract, back to the first euro."

Matthias frowned. "For what?"

"To publish. Everything. Open the books."

He went very still. "Kieran. You can't just—"

"I can. And I will." I stood, crossing to the window. Below, Prenzlauer Berg was waking up — trams, cyclists, a man walking a dog in the drizzle. Ordinary people going about ordinary mornings. "Elara's betting that secrecy looks like guilt. So I'll make secrecy impossible. Full transparency. Every month, published publicly. Revenue, costs, salaries, funding sources. Everything except individual client data."

"You'll be handing our competitors our margins."

"I'll be handing the public the truth. And the truth is the one thing Elara can't spin." I turned back to him. "She's spent her whole life assuming everyone's as cynical as she is. That's her weakness. The public isn't hungry for scandal — they're hungry for someone who isn't lying to them."

Matthias was quiet for a long moment. Then he shook his head, slowly, and something in his face shifted — pride, maybe, or surprise, or both.

"You know," he said, "when I met you, I thought you were just another rich kid with a grudge."

"And now?"

"Now I think you might actually be the real thing." He picked up the printout, folded it neatly, and dropped it in the bin. "I'll get you the accounts."

---

We published on the first of March. A single page on the Vireo website: *Our Books, Open.* Every figure, every source, every decision, laid out in plain language. I wrote the introduction myself, at 04:00, with cold coffee and the scarf around my neck.

*We believe trust is earned, not demanded. Here is everything we have. Judge us on it.*

The response wasn't immediate. For six hours, nothing. Then Sophie's piece went live — not a puff profile, but a forensic breakdown of our numbers, verified independently, with a single line near the end that made my chest tighten: *In an industry built on opacity, Vireo has done something almost unheard of. It has told the truth.*

By evening, three of the investors Elara had frightened off had called back. By the end of the week, we had a waiting list.

I stood in the loft that Friday night, long after everyone had gone, watching the city lights blur through the rain-streaked glass. The transfer request was still in my inbox. Still unopened. Still waiting.

I hadn't used it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But the doubt was still there, coiled in my chest — the knowledge that Elara would not stop, that transparency was a shield and not a sword, and that sooner or later I'd have to decide whether to keep building or finally burn her down.

For now, I let myself feel it. The pride. The clean, unfamiliar weight of having done something right.

It didn't feel like winning. It felt better.

*In business, is transparency always the best policy — or can it be a tactical move?*