Chapter 3 - The Paper Trail
The heavy leather of Victor’s shoes shifted against the rug.
"Three point four million is not a small discrepancy, Travis," Victor said, his voice dropping into a tense, nervous register. "The tax authorities in Delaware are already scrutinizing the capital allocations from the third quarter. What about Eliza?"
Hearing my name spoken in that cold, clinical tone by a man who had eaten dinner at my family's Thanksgiving table for five straight years sent a surge of adrenaline through my veins.
I clamped my gloved hand over my mouth, squeezing my eyes shut.
Travis let out a low, dry laugh—a sound completely devoid of warmth or hesitation.
"Her signature is on the documents, Victor," Travis said smoothly. "Every single authorization page for the capital transfer bears her legal name and personal witness seal."
"And if she challenges the transfer in court?" Victor pressed. "Her divorce counsel has been filing discovery demands all month."
"She won't challenge it," Travis said, his tone turning colder, laced with an arrogant, dismissive contempt that made my skin crawl. "Eliza doesn't have the financial stamina to survive another three months of legal delays. She's desperate. She's broken."
Then came the sentence that shattered my heart into a thousand jagged pieces.
"Besides," Travis added, walking around the desk—his polished black Oxford shoes stopping directly in front of the leather chair that hid me. "She has access to the building every night now."
I stopped breathing entirely.
"What does her cleaning job have to do with the wire authorization?" Victor asked, sounding confused.
"It establishes physical presence and access, Victor," Travis explained with terrifying, methodical precision. " Apex Commercial Cleaning logs her security badge at the service entrance every night at 9:00 p.m. Her card scans into the administrative wings, the file rooms, and the executive floor. If the auditors raise a red flag about forged transfer mandates, my legal team will simply point out that Eliza had full, unsupervised night access to my private office and my desktop terminal."
He paused, taking a slow drink of his whiskey.
"We will show that she stole the private authorization tokens, executed the transfers herself to liquidate the family trust before the divorce finalization, and attempted to frame the company. The paper trail is bulletproof."
Underneath the desk, in the dark, shadows swam before my eyes.
The navy-blue jumpsuit. The cleaning badge around my neck. The twenty-two-dollar-an-hour cash job.
It hadn't been an act of petty humiliation. It hadn't been Travis enjoying my financial downfall.
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It was a masterclass in criminal setup.
He hadn't just pushed me out of the company we built together. He had hired Apex, ensured I was assigned to his personal headquarters, and built an ironclad digital and physical paper trail that would send the mother of his children to a federal prison for grand larceny while he walked away with three point four million dollars.
