One night, around 3:00 AM, my eyes were too blurry to read the spreadsheets. Arthur gently took the laptop from my hands and closed it.
“You have to sleep, Claire,” he murmured, his shoulder brushing against mine.
“I can’t,” I whispered, staring at the blank screen. “If I close my eyes, I just see Julian’s face. I see Victoria’s smile. I see them getting away with it.”
Arthur reached out, his warm fingers gently tilting my chin up so I had to look at him. “They won’t. I promise you, Claire. I have watched that woman destroy my family from the inside out. I am not going to let her destroy you.”
For a brief, suspended moment, the war faded. There was only the quiet hum of the servers and the intense, grounding depth of his gaze. I leaned into his touch, feeling safe for the first time in a decade.
“I found it!” Marcus suddenly shouted from the corner desk, shattering the quiet.
We rushed over. Marcus pointed a shaking finger at the screen. “The master ledger. Victoria’s entire shadow-accounting system. It’s all stored on an encrypted, physical master drive.”
“Where is it?” Arthur demanded.
“It’s not in the cloud,” Marcus typed furiously. “It’s stored locally. In Julian’s private safe at the downtown penthouse.”
My heart stopped. The penthouse. The one I still technically had access to.
“I’m going,” I said immediately.
An hour later, I slipped my old keycard into the penthouse door. It clicked green. I crept through the dark, luxurious living room toward Julian’s office. I knew the code to his safe—it was our wedding anniversary. A sickening irony.
I punched in the numbers. Click. I opened the heavy steel door. Sitting right in the center was a sleek, silver hard drive. The holy grail.
I grabbed it, my heart soaring with victory. But as I turned around to leave, the office lights flicked on, blinding me.
Standing in the doorway, holding a glass of scotch, was Julian.
“Hello, Claire,” he smiled, his eyes completely dead. “I had a feeling you’d come back for your things.”
Julian blocked the only exit.
“Put the drive down, Claire,” he said, taking a slow sip of his drink. “You’re trespassing. I could call the police right now and have you arrested for burglary.”
I clutched the silver drive to my chest, my mind racing. “This drive proves everything, Julian. It proves Victoria stole my father’s legacy. It proves the embezzlement.”
“It proves nothing if it’s wiped clean,” Julian countered, taking a step forward. “Give it to me, and I’ll ask my mother to drop the defamation lawsuits against you. You can walk away with a nice, quiet settlement. You’ll never have to work a day in your life. We can just… erase all of this.”
“Like you erased my father?” I spat.
Julian’s face hardened. He lunged for me.
But before his hands could grab the drive, a sharp, frantic voice echoed from the hallway.
“Julian, don’t!”
We both turned. Vanessa stood there, her makeup smeared, clutching a thick file of papers. She looked absolutely terrified.
“Vanessa? What the hell are you doing here?” Julian barked.
Vanessa looked at him, then at me. “Victoria is setting me up,” she choked out, tears spilling over her eyelashes. “I just intercepted an email from legal. Victoria isn’t going to blame the junior staff. She’s going to blame me. She’s framing me as the sole mastermind behind the embezzlement to protect you, Julian!”
Julian scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Vanessa. My mother would never—”
“She already signed the police report!” Vanessa screamed, throwing the file onto the floor. She turned to me, her eyes wild with desperation. “Claire. If you take them down, do you promise to keep me out of jail?”
“I don’t make deals with people who sleep in my bed,” I said coldly.