Chapter 5 - The Trap Springing LiveTrevor’s face flushed bright red with embarrassment and rage. He fished the key out of his drink, his voice shaking. "Brooke! What kind of sick game are you playing? You belong in a jail cell! Security! Security, get this woman out of here!"
Two heavy security guards stepped forward, but Reid merely held up a single finger.
"Touch her, and Vance Logistics revokes the security contract for this entire building before you reach the elevator," Reid said smoothly. The guards instantly stopped in their tracks. They knew who paid their paychecks.
Chloe stepped forward, her teeth gritted into a fake smile for the surrounding cameras. "Reid, this is embarrassing. You’ve brought an unhinged, bankrupt woman as your date to a corporate takeover? The board has already voted. You are finished."
"The board voted based on documents provided by you, Chloe," Reid said loudly, ensuring every news camera in the room turned toward them. "Documents that claimed forty million dollars was funneled into an offshore account owned by Brooke Ellery."
"It's a matter of federal record!" Trevor shouted, pointing a finger at Brooke. "She stole it! She used my access codes while we were married!"
Brooke took a step closer to Trevor. She didn't flinch.
"Trevor," Brooke said, her voice echoed through the wireless microphone Reid had secretly clipped to her dress, broadcasting her voice over the entire ballroom’s sound system. "If I stole forty million dollars on October 14th at 2:00 PM... how is it that the IP address used to complete the transaction was registered to the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun?"
Trevor blinked, his confidence suddenly faltering. "What... what are you talking about?"
"On October 14th, I was at my mother's bedside in Dallas while she was in intensive care," Brooke continued, taking another step forward. "I have hospital time-stamped security footage, nurse logs, and biometric receipts proving I didn't touch a computer for seventy-two hours."
The crowd began to whisper frantically. Reporters were typing furiously on their tablets.
"That doesn't prove anything!" Chloe snapped, her voice losing its polished edge. "She could have used a proxy server!"
"She could have," Reid interjected, stepping up beside Brooke. "If she knew how to program a VPN. But Brooke didn't even have access to her own home Wi-Fi password—because Trevor changed it two months prior to hide his communications with you, Chloe."
Reid pulled a remote control from his pocket and pressed a red button.
The massive high-definition screens behind the main stage—which were supposed to display the new corporate logo of the merged company—suddenly went black.
A second later, a line of code appeared, followed by a video feed.
It was high-resolution, crystal-clear security footage from the private suite in Cancun. It showed Trevor sitting at a laptop with Chloe sitting on his lap, drinking champagne while Trevor logged into the Vance Logistics internal server using an stolen master encryption key.
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The entire ballroom erupted into shouts and gasps.
"Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" Chloe screamed at the tech crew, but Reid’s team had fully locked down the entire hotel's network infrastructure.
