The phone remained pressed to my ear, but the voice of Gloria—my mother-in-law, my parasite-in-law—faded into white noise. I stared past the glass wall of the corporate skyscraper at the Chicago skyline, glittering like an endless circuit board under a frozen night sky. / Chapter 9 / 20

Chapter 9 - The AftermathTwo weeks later, the storm had already passed through the corporate world, leaving nothing in its wake but clean slate and total dominion.

Back in my corner office on the forty-sixth floor of Carter Holdings, the city of Chicago looked magnificent beneath a crisp autumn sun. The transition of power was complete. Sebastian’s name had been completely scrubbed from every secondary account, credit line, and residential property associated with my name.

The legal fallout for Sebastian and Alyssa had been swift and merciless. Because Alyssa was the registered owner of the Cayman Island shell company, federal investigators pursued the wire fraud charges aggressively. Without a dime of my money to pay for high-priced defense attorneys, Alyssa was forced to rely on a public defender—and, according to my legal team, she was already cooperating with prosecutors to mitigate her sentence by pointing the finger directly at Sebastian as the mastermind who pressured her into the scheme.

As for Sebastian? He was currently crashing on his mother Gloria’s cramped living room couch in a modest suburban townhouse in Indiana, drowning in legal debt, facing civil lawsuits for corporate conspiracy, and completely blacklisted from the Chicago business community. Every single executive, vendor, and partner we had spent years cultivating had been briefed on his stunt; no one in their right mind would touch him with a ten-foot pole.

My phone chimed on the mahogany desk.

It was an automated security alert from my personal residence in Highland Park.

Front gate camera detected movement.

I tapped the screen, pulling up the live security feed. A delivery driver was standing outside the massive wrought-iron gates, dropping off a heavy, legal-sized manila envelope left by the local courier service.

I buzzed down to building security, having them retrieve the package and bring it up to my office.

Ten minutes later, my executive assistant—a brilliant, fiercely loyal corporate strategist named Elena whom I had personally recruited from our London branch—placed the heavy envelope on my desk.

"From the circuit court in Palm Beach, Mrs. Carter," Elena said calmly, her expression entirely professional. "The final dissolution decree. Uncontested. Default judgment granted in your favor due to failure of response."