Chapter 4 - The Audit of ShadowsBy dawn, I was back at Cole Dominion Holdings, but I wasn't sitting in my executive chair. I was down in the basement archives, a dusty, climate-controlled vault where my grandfather had stored seventy years of handwritten corporate ledgers and offshore contracts.
Marcus stood beside me, holding a powerful industrial flashlight as I hauled heavy leather-bound books off the top shelves.
"Sir, the board is calling every ten minutes," Marcus said, his voice laced with genuine worry. "Mr. Henderson is threatening to call an emergency vote if you don't show up for the ten o'clock merger briefing with the Pacific Group."
"Tell Henderson he can run the meeting off a cliff," I muttered, blowing a thick layer of dust off a 2018 acquisition file. "Marcus, look at this binding. It's been tampered with."
Marcus leaned in, shining the flashlight beam across the spine of the ledger. The thread was a different color—nylon instead of cotton. Someone had carefully unstitched the binding, replaced three pages of financial liabilities, and re-sewed it to fool any standard internal audit.
"My father," I whispered. "He didn't just take out the Bratva loan. He hid it inside the subsidiary accounts of the Westbridge expansion."
"And if those accounts default..." Marcus started, his eyes widening.
"Cole Dominion Holdings goes under," I finished. "Not just a dip in stock value. Complete, catastrophic liquidation. Every building, every warehouse, every cent we own seized by private creditors within forty-eight hours."
I sat back against a stack of archive boxes, running my hands through my hair. Richard Vance hadn't been lying. Vanessa had discovered this financial abyss months ago. She hadn't been laughing at me with her friends; she had been laughing at the sheer, terrifying absurdity of her own life, trying to keep up appearances while secretly bleeding her own personal trust fund to pay off the interest installments to the Russian syndicate's front men.
And I had treated her like a gold-digger. I had humiliated her on the street like a common beggar.
"Find her," I ordered, standing up so fast the archive boxes wobbled. "I want every private investigator, every traffic camera feed, every flight manifest out of Charlotte checked within the hour. Find Vanessa Hart."
"Sir," Marcus hesitated, lowering the flashlight. "There's something else. I checked the financial transfers on Vanessa's personal trust account just now, using the emergency clearance you gave me for wedding logistics."
He pulled a folded printout from his inner pocket and handed it to me.
My eyes scanned the numbers, and the breath left my lungs.
Vanessa hadn't just been paying off interest. Two days ago—the exact morning I decided to dress like a beggar—she had transferred three million dollars—every single dime she owned, including her childhood home—to an account bearing the name Vance Holdings.
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"She didn't run away to hide from me," I realized, the horror dawning in my chest like a rising tide. "She went to meet her uncle."
"And according to local harbor police logs," Marcus added grimly, "Richard Vance's yacht left the private marina at midnight, heading out into the Atlantic toward the Bahamas. Vanessa was on board."
