His Assistant Slapped His Wife at Dinner, and the Woman He Told to Stay Quiet Was Holding His Entire Empire Together

While Evan was being stripped of his empire on the 40th floor, Sloane Keller was sitting in a corner booth at a café on 53rd Street, desperately dialing Evan's private number.

*The number you have dialed is no longer in service or has been temporarily disconnected.*

"Damn it! Damn it!" she hissed, slamming her iPhone onto the marble tabletop so hard the ceramic coffee mug rattled.

Her world had unraveled in less than twelve hours.

When she woke up at 6:30 AM in her luxury high-rise apartment in Hudson Yards—an apartment whose six-thousand-dollar monthly rent had been paid through Aegis Brand Management—her key fob hadn't worked on the private garage gate.

Then her corporate card was declined when she tried to pay for a green juice.

Then she saw the morning news.

She wasn't stupid. Sloane had clawed her way up from nothing, using her youth, her looks, and Evan’s desperate, fragile ego to secure a life she had only ever seen on Instagram. She had known Evan was married, but Evan had spent eighteen months telling her that Claire was an empty shell—a quiet, frail socialite who lived off ancestral trusts and wouldn't dare challenge him.

*She slapped me with words, so I slapped her across the face,* Sloane thought, her chest heaving with venomous anger. *How was I supposed to know she was the bank?!*

Her phone suddenly buzzed.

An incoming call. Unknown number.

She snatched it up. "Evan?!"

"Ms. Keller," a cold, unfamiliar female voice answered. "This is Detective Miller from the Manhattan Financial Crimes Task Force."

Sloane felt the blood drain from her face. "Who?"

"We have a warrant for your financial records relating to Aegis Brand Management, as well as an active misdemeanor assault complaint filed with the Midtown North precinct," the voice continued smoothly. "We’ve dispatched a car to your residence. I suggest you turn yourself in voluntarily."

Sloane hung up immediately.

Her breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps. Her hands shook so violently she could barely hold her bag.

*They're coming for me,* she realized. *Evan threw me to the wolves. He’s going to pin the whole four million on me.*

A feral desperation overtook her. Evan had always kept a backup safe in the Hawthorne executive office—a physical floor safe hidden beneath the Persian rug in his private suite. He had bragged to her once that he kept fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds, spare passports, and private flash drives with encrypted communication records just in case "the SEC ever got nosy."

If she could get those drives, she had leverage. She could prove Evan ordered the wires. She could prove she wasn't the mastermind—she was just the beneficiary.

Sloane threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table, pulled her trench coat tight, and hurried out into the rain toward the Hawthorne tower. She still had one physical brass key to the executive suite’s rear stairwell.