I sat in my oversized leather executive chair—the one Mason had begged my father to let him use just last week—with my wedding veil draped haphazardly over the back. My hair was still pinned up with pearl clips, and my silk dress was ruined, but I had never felt more powerful.
Marcus Vance, our outside counsel, sat across the mahogany desk alongside two forensic accountants.
“We’ve locked down all secondary accounts tied to Mason’s front companies,” Marcus reported, tapping furiously on his laptop. “Not only did he embezzle the 1.8 million from the acquisitions fund, but we found a separate wire transfer originating from a competitor—Vanguard Enterprises. They were paying him for proprietary bids on the upcoming Metro Rail project.”
My jaw tightened. Industrial espionage on top of domestic abuse and corporate theft. Mason hadn’t just been playing a dangerous game; he had been building a parachute for the day he inevitably betrayed us all.
“Vanguard?” I murmured. “That’s CEO Richard Sterling’s firm.”
“The very same,” Marcus confirmed, sliding a digital dossier across the desk. “Sterling thought he was buying our development strategy. Instead, he just bought himself a federal indictment for conspiracy and bribery. All documents were routed through Mason’s personal server.”
I opened the file. There it was: an email chain between Mason and Sterling, signed off just three days before our wedding.
“The blueprints are yours once the marriage certificate is signed. Bellweather will be too distracted by the merger to notice.”
“He really thought he was invincible,” I whispered.
“Arrogance is a criminal’s best friend,” Marcus noted, closing his laptop. “What’s our next move, Boss? Do we drop this to the DOJ tonight?”
I leaned back in the chair, spinning it slowly to look out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows at the glittering skyline of the city. Down there, somewhere in a holding cell, Mason was realizing that his charm, his suits, and his lies couldn’t buy him out of this.
“No,” I said quietly, a dangerous smile touching my lips. “Not yet. Let Richard Sterling sweat through the weekend wondering why his star inside man hasn’t called him back. Let them panic. We strike at dawn on Monday.”
