Chapter 3 - The First Casualty
The knock on my loft door came at 8:15 PM.
I didn’t look through the peephole. I already knew who it was. I could hear the heavy, frantic footsteps in the hallway—footsteps that belonged to a man accustomed to kicking doors down, not waiting for them to open.
I unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open just an inch before Daniel slammed his palm against the wood, shoving it wide.
His right hand was wrapped in heavy white gauze and splinted with aluminum—a permanent reminder of what happened when he forgot who he was dealing with. His face was pale, his designer suit rumpled as if he had slept in it.
“Are you out of your absolute mind?” he hissed, stepping into the entryway. He stopped short when he saw Evelyn sitting quietly on the sofa. “Mom? What are you doing with her? Get your coat. Dad is furious.”
Evelyn didn’t move. She kept her hands folded in her lap, looking at her son with a strange, hollow calm. “I’m not going back there, Daniel.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Daniel snapped, turning back to me with a venomous glare. “You’ve poisoned her mind. And you—you broke my hand, Claire. Do you have any idea what kind of legal nightmare you’ve stepped into? Domestic assault, extortion, unauthorized entry into my personal affairs—”
“Your personal affairs?” I interrupted, walking slowly toward the kitchen island where my laptop screen glowed in the dim light. I turned the monitor outward so he could see it. “Is that what you call moving twelve million dollars of operating capital into a Bahamian shell corporation to dodge your creditors?”
Daniel froze. The color drained completely from his face, leaving him a sickly, ashen gray.
“Where did you—”
“You left your laptop unlocked in the bridal suite, Daniel,” I lied smoothly. In truth, I had cracked his personal iCloud credentials using a brute-force decryption script in under two minutes, but let him think he was careless. It hurt his ego more. “Turns out, using your childhood golden retriever’s name combined with your birth year as a master password isn’t the best security protocol for a corporate executive.”
He lunged forward, reaching for the laptop, but I stepped aside and calmly closed the lid, locking the encrypted drive.
“Don’t touch it,” I warned. “That’s a mirror copy of the hard drive. The original is already uploaded to a secure federal server, along with a complete accounting of every fraudulent loan document you and your father signed over the last three years.”
Daniel stared at me as if he were looking at a stranger. For eighteen months, he had played the part of the devoted, slightly insecure tech entrepreneur who needed my stabilizing influence. He thought I was a compliant accessory.
“You’re bluffing,” he whispered, though his voice trembled. “You’re just a compliance consultant. You don’t have federal contacts.”
“I was an auditor for the DOJ, Daniel,” I said softly, stepping close enough that he could see the cold resolve in my eyes. “When I left government service, I didn’t lose my badge numbers. I just changed my billing rate.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out with his good hand, glanced at the screen, and swore violently.
“What is it?” I asked.
May you like
“The board,” he choked out, his fingers shaking against the glass. “First National just called a default on our commercial credit line. They’re freezing all corporate accounts.”
I smiled. “Tell your father I said hello.”
