Chapter 2 - The Penthouse Suite

The silence in the back of the town car was suffocating. Adrian stared out the window at the passing lights of Michigan Avenue, his jaw tight. I held an ice pack to my bruised elbow, staring at the floor mats.

The moment we entered our Gold Coast penthouse, Adrian threw his tuxedo jacket over a velvet chair.

"You just couldn't handle it, could you?" he snapped, turning on me. "You couldn't let me have one night. You had to throw a hysterical fit and drag your father out of the woodwork to humiliate me."

"I humiliated you?" I asked, dropping the ice pack on the granite kitchen island. "You assaulted me in front of five hundred employees. You kissed your secretary on a stage."

"Vanessa is practically a partner in my division," he fired back, pouring himself three fingers of scotch. "She put in the hours to get me that CEO spot while you were redecorating the guest room. And your dad? He's a dinosaur. He suspended the ceremony to save face, but the board already voted. He can't stop my contract. I have leverage he wouldn't dare test."

He drained the glass, grabbed his briefcase, and headed for the master bedroom. "I'm going to the office. Sleep in the guest room. We are doing damage control tomorrow, and you are going to smile for the cameras."

The front door slammed a few minutes later.

I stood in the quiet kitchen, replaying his words. I have leverage he wouldn't dare test.

Adrian had left his backup work laptop on the dining table. I walked over, opened it, and bypassed the password prompt using the administrator backdoor I had quietly installed on our home network years ago. If Adrian had leverage on a man as ruthless as Samuel Vale, I needed to know what it was before I filed for divorce.

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I opened his encrypted cloud drive. Inside was a folder labeled Vale Trust Audit.

When I opened the first PDF, I stopped breathing. It was a massive, offshore wire transfer authorization from Valeon’s corporate pension fund. But it wasn't signed by my father. The signature at the bottom of the page was mine.