Chapter 6 - The AuditBy midnight, the house was dead silent. The heavy thud of suitcases dragging down the front steps had echoed through the halls an hour earlier, followed by the slamming of a taxi door and the screech of tires peeling away into the dark. David and his parents were gone.
I sat at my mahogany home office desk, a cup of hot chamomile tea steaming beside my laptop. The screen was illuminated by a glowing financial dashboard.
With David out of the picture, I finally had unhindered access to the deep layers of his personal and corporate expenditures. For years, he had gaslit me into believing that his financial acumen was what kept our lifestyle afloat. But as I dove deeper into the ledger, a far darker and more lucrative truth began to emerge.
David hadn't just been cheating on me with Chloe. He had been systematically siphoning funds from my personal pre-marital venture accounts into a shell corporation registered under a fake Cayman Islands address—a shell corporation co-owned by none other than his longtime business partner, Marcus Vance.
I scrolled through wire transfer receipts totaling over $1.2 million.
My phone buzzed on the desk. It was an incoming encrypted email from my private forensic accountant, Sarah.
“Eleanor, you need to see this attachment immediately. Marcus Vance and David didn't just empty your reserve accounts. They used your venture capital portfolio as collateral for an unauthorized high-risk real estate loan in downtown Manhattan. If you file the paperwork right now, Marcus is legally tied to David’s fraud. They’re both going down.”
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I leaned back in my leather chair, a slow, predatory smile spreading across my lips.
David thought he was clever by running away to Manhattan. But he had no idea that he had just walked right into a financial landmine of his own creation. And I held the detonator.
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