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

Evan was brought into the room flanked by two burly private security guards.

He looked ruined. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his expensive Italian leather shoes scuffed with street grime. The arrogant, swaggering CEO who had smirked as his mistress humiliated his wife at Le Petit Châtelet was completely gone. In his place was a hollow, trembling ruin of a man.

Claire remained seated. She did not offer him a chair.

"You have four minutes, Evan," she said.

Evan fell to his knees on the Persian rug three feet in front of her desk.

"Claire... please," he choked out, actual tears spilling down his hollow cheeks. "Don't destroy me. I don't care about the CEO title. Take Hawthorne. Take the shares. Just don't send me to federal prison. If you press charges for the Aegis wires, I’m looking at ten to fifteen years."

"You should have considered federal sentencing guidelines before you wired millions of dollars to your mistress," Claire said coldly.

"It wasn't my idea!" Evan sobbed, clutching at the edge of her desk with trembling fingers. "Sloane had something on me! She found files from four years ago!"

Claire leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. "What files?"

"The Bahamas," Evan whispered, his voice cracking with terror. "Your father’s flight manifests. The maintenance logs for the Sikorsky S-76."

Claire felt a cold fist clamp down on her heart. The room seemed to drop ten degrees.

"What are you talking about?" she asked, her voice dropping into a register so dark Marcus Reed instinctively stepped closer.

"I didn't do it, Claire! I swear to God I didn't do it!" Evan wept, his forehead touching the mahogany wood. "Your father was going to cut Hawthorne off back then. He knew I was overleveraged. He was going to cancel the seed round and audit my accounts before we married. He had the files in his briefcase on that flight."

"Evan," Claire stood up, her shadow falling across his kneeling form. "What did Sloane find?"

"Someone paid the mechanic in Nassau twenty thousand dollars to falsify the hydraulic pressure certification," Evan blubbered. "The wire didn't come from me! It came from a blind account in Zurich. But Sloane found the transfer slip in my personal archive safe! She thought it was me! She threatened to take it to the FBI if I didn't set up Aegis for her!"

Claire’s breath hitched.

Her father hadn't died from mechanical failure. Julian Beaumont had been murdered.

And Evan had known about the falsified logs. He had buried the evidence in his safe to protect the Hawthorne deal, keeping the truth hidden while he married Julian's daughter and took control of the family empire.

"Where is the transfer slip, Evan?" Claire asked, her voice shaking with a rage so profound it made her vision blur.

"It was in my office safe," Evan whispered. "In the executive suite."

At that exact moment, Marcus’s phone rang.

Marcus answered it, listened for five seconds, and his face turned stark white.

"Claire," Marcus said, his voice tight. "Hawthorne security just intercepted Sloane Keller in Evan’s office. She broke into the floor safe."

"Did she get the files?" Claire demanded.

"No," Marcus said, his throat bobbing. "She didn't get the files because the safe wasn't empty. There was a secondary lockbox. And when security tackled her, a third party was already in the room."

"Who?"