Chapter 3 - The Ghost in the MachineFor the next six weeks, I vanished from the map.
Officially, Evelyn Vance was dead—lost to the dark depths of a northern lake, mourned by a hypocritical family who wore black suits and whispered prayers of relief behind closed doors.
Unofficially, I was operating out of a secure, high-tech safehouse in downtown Chicago, working side-by-side with Mara Chen and a team of top-tier forensic investigators.
We didn't just audit Wren Holdings; we tore open every shell company, every dummy vendor, and every real estate portfolio my father and brother had manipulated over the past decade. We discovered that Grant wasn't just siphoning money from Wren Holdings—he had mortgaged the family’s historic commercial properties to a syndicate of high-risk predatory lenders using forged signatures from our father.
My father wasn't just covering for Grant; he was terrified of him. Grant had discovered that our father embezzled corporate pension funds years ago to bail out his own failing private investments, and Grant had been blackmailing him ever since.
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A rotting house built on lies, betrayal, and murder.
And on a crisp, clear Tuesday morning in October, exactly six weeks to the day since they threw me into the freezing water, the foundation of that house finally collapsed.
