Whispers exploded into shouts. Phones appeared. Cameras flashed.Velmoré Group. Lily's company. The one that had died six months ago.Vivian's face went from pale to gray. "That's impossible. There must be some mistake." Her voice climbed higher with each word. "Yesterday's press conference confirmed everything. I haven't received any termination notice—"Her phone buzzed.Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession.She fumbled it from her purse with shaking hands. The screen lit her face blue-white as she read, and Lily watched her expression crumble like wet paper."No." The word barely made it past her lips. "No, this isn't—"Ryan grabbed the phone. Read. His tan drained to ash."Suspected violations," he said quietly. "Three days to submit evidence or face formal investigation.""Fix this." Vivian snatched the phone back, her perfectly manicured nails digging into Ryan's arm hard enough to leave marks. "You know people. You have connections. Fix this right now."Ryan said nothin

The police station's service hall smelled like burnt coffee and regret.Diane sat hunched on a plastic chair with an ice pack pressed to her swollen eye, looking like someone had put her designer clothes through a car wash and forgotten to remove her first. Vivian stood over her, arms crossed, and the fury radiating off her daughter was almost tangible enough to taste."You're unbelievable." Vivian's voice was low and shaking. "Do you have any idea what kind of day I've had? My company's IPO just got suspended. I was thrown out of my own celebration banquet in front of two hundred people. And now I have to bail my mother out of jail because she decided to play burglar?""It wasn't like that—" Diane started."Then what was it like?" Vivian's voice rose sharply enough to make heads turn. "Enlighten me, Mother. What possible explanation could you have for breaking into someone's apartment?""I didn't break in!" Diane's protest came out muffled by the ice pack. "The security guards made a

The photos arrived at 3 AM like a knife between ribs.Vivian hadn't been sleeping—hadn't really slept since the bell-ringing ceremony where her entire life had detonated in front of two hundred witnesses. But she'd been lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, rehearsing all the ways she'd explain to investors why her company's IPO had been suspended. All the perfectly crafted lies that might salvage something from the wreckage.Her phone buzzed. Ryan's name lit the screen with an attachment.Thought you should see this.She almost didn't open it. Almost deleted the message and went back to cataloging her failures in the dark. But her thumb moved on autopilot, and suddenly her screen filled with images that made her heart stop and restart wrong.Ethan.Her Ethan—except no, not hers anymore, never really hers—standing beside a car. But not just any car. Something sleek and European that cost more than their entire first year of marriage. And he wasn't alone.The woman from the ceremony. T

The drive back was a study in silence and tension.Ethan gripped the steering wheel like it had personally offended him, jaw set in that way that meant he was calculating seventeen moves ahead while she couldn't even process the current one. The Aston Martin ate up miles with mechanical precision, but the warmth from dinner had evaporated like champagne left open overnight.Lily wanted to ask questions. Wanted to demand explanations for the message that had transformed him from almost-vulnerable to completely closed off in the space of a heartbeat. But something in the rigid line of his shoulders warned her that now wasn't the time.So she sat in silence and watched the city blur past, feeling the distance between them expand with every block.When they pulled up to the penthouse, Ethan barely put the car in park before his phone rang again. Marcus's name flashed across the dashboard display."I have to take this," Ethan said, and it wasn't an apology so much as a statement of fact."

The upload bar crept across Lily's screen with agonizing slowness, each percentage point feeling like an eternity compressed into digital progress.92%... 93%... 94%...Her finger hovered over the cancel button—one final chance to back out, to choose safety over strategy, to be the careful woman who'd learned that risks ended in ruin. But that woman had died in a bankruptcy six months ago, and the person sitting at this desk now was someone entirely different.Someone willing to bet everything on a carefully constructed lie.100%. Upload complete.The fake pitch sat on her company server like bait in a trap, dressed in all the markers of legitimate work. File names that suggested authenticity. Creation dates that matched her timeline. Even the metadata had been scrubbed and rebuilt to pass casual inspection. Ethan had insisted on perfection, and perfection was what they'd created.Except buried in the document's permissions was a flaw so subtle most security experts would miss it. A t