Chapter 17 - THE SECRETS OF THE VAULTBack in the quiet warmth of our Manhattan penthouse office, the flash drive lay on the glass table between Luca and me like a sleeping bomb.
"Do you want to open it?" Luca asked, pouring two glasses of scotch and handing one to me.
"We have to," I said, sitting down and plugging the drive into my secure terminal.
Lines of encrypted data began scrolling across the high-definition monitor. Financial records, shell corporation linkages, wire transfers—and a master list of political and corporate beneficiaries who had been taking kickbacks from Marcus Vance's laundering ring for over a decade.
And right there near the top of the list was a name none of us expected to see: Arthur Sterling—the chairman of the board of Caldwell Capital who had supposedly been retired and clean for years.
"Well, well," Luca whistled softly, leaning over my shoulder to read the screen. "It wasn't just Ryan. Ryan was just the front man. Sterling was the mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows all along, using Caldwell Capital as his personal piggy bank."
"And when Ryan started getting sloppy with Vanessa, Sterling decided to let him take the fall," I realized, a cold realization settling into my chest. "Sterling orchestrated the whole gala introduction to force our hand, hoping we'd destroy Ryan and eliminate the weakest link before the feds traced the money back to him."
"Which means," Luca smiled grimly, "Sterling thinks he won."
"Then it's time to show him how wrong he is," I said, standing up and closing the laptop. "Tomorrow morning is the quarterly board meeting of Moretti-DeSantis Global. Sterling is scheduled to chair the advisory panel."
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"What’s your play?" Luca asked, his eyes gleaming with admiration.
"We give him a front-row seat to his own corporate execution."
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