Secret Revenge: An Enemies-to-Lovers Billionaire Romance

18. Emily

My feet tapped impatiently as I waited for Michael to finish sorting out the documents on the flash drive. It seemed like he’d spent hours going through all the information on it. I told myself to be patient. Told myself it was a lot of information.

I yawned, blinking rapidly as my eyes burned from lack of sleep. When this was all over, I would take a few days for myself to relax and recuperate from the stress of everything. But for now, sleep could wait.

I hated the emotions warring within me as I watched Michael work. I felt guilty about handing all of Travis’s data over to someone else, about intending to use it to ruin him. I felt angry at Travis and I wanted Michael to be done now, so I could know how much Travis deserved my hatred. I wanted Travis out of my head, wanted not to feel hatred or guilt. I wanted to be an objective observer, like a truly independent journalist was supposed to be.

My eyes focused back on the screen, getting lost in it as Michael scrolled through all of the information on the drive. Spreadsheets, reports, emails. The longer we spent snooping through his personal files, the heavier the sinking feeling in my chest became.

We sat quietly, unable to look away or speak.

Everything that we could see on the screen was our worst nightmare.

Travis was doing the worst thing that we could ever imagine… and that was… absolutely nothing wrong.

All this time and effort we had spent on this mission was for nothing. We had gone through all his emails, as well as their private documents over again, dividing the tasks between us and trying to see if there was anything that we had missed…but it was the same result.

We had never seen anyone squeaky clean like he was in every single business dealing. He was a perfect gentleman, even in private emails that he had locked down under top security.

Travis was the kind of businessman I had not believed really existed. Everyone who worked for him received what was due to them, and those who did anything important got credit for their work. Even those who refused him what he wanted were treated with nothing but respect.

We had also noticed in several emails that he had refused to sell bad assets or engage in insider trading. He chastised people who had offered such to him and made sure every single bad deal was rejected with no room for arguments.

Ever since he took over, everything about his business to the littlest detail was completely legitimate. He had cut off every business dealing from his father’s time that did not appear to be legitimate.

I looked at Michael who was also lost for words and noticed that he had the same expression as I did. I found it difficult to wrap my head around this reality.

I was reeling.

This gave me no satisfaction or vindication for my vendetta. All my years of hard work to bring down the Rosses, and the time I spent working against Travis… was for nothing. The futility was crushing.

More than anything else, I was reeling because I hated the way all of this made me feel.

I hated that I actually loved the fact that he was clean. I hated that I was relieved and felt lighter than I had in months. I hated that I’d had my fingers crossed the whole time that this would be the outcome.

Now I really did feel guilty for deceiving him. And worse: part of me was relieved. This was very bad, because I was relieved that I could pursue a relationship with him without feeling guilty. And no, I absolutely could not. Not after tonight. Tomorrow his lawyers would probably be serving me papers to throw me in prison.

What had I done? How had I managed to put myself in a situation where I would not only be imprisoned, but imprisoned by the man I loved?

Snap out of it, Emily. You don’t love him.

The part of me that had been falling for him had been secretly hoping that the kind persona he put out there for people was the real him and there was nothing else to discover outside of that. Part of me had been hoping he’d prove me wrong, not just about himself, but about humanity in general.

And he had. And now he was going to hate me. Rightfully so.

“This can’t be happening,” Michael murmured in shock, breaking our long silence.

Then I gasped as something Travis had said came back to me.

“Oh! The secret file. Remember the secret file on his phone? We haven’t found anything obviously secret yet.” I told him. “Maybe we can find something about this secret project that we can use against him. There must be a reason he concealed those files so much more carefully than anything else on his phone.”

There it was: my last hope. My last hope of a story, of a career, of freedom. My chances for a relationship with Travis were already gone, one way or another.

If he’d encrypted something on his phone even more tightly than his other personal files, maybe he’d done the same on his company’s servers.

Michael frowned. “You’re right. There must be something we haven’t found yet. I’ll run a deep scan for any hidden files, for any data that could possibly be concealed.”

I got up to make us coffee. Hours later, he found it: sure enough, there was a secret file on the drive. He’d had to use special software to even root out its existence.

The file was filled with folders and each of those folders was titled with the names of different people.

I leaned forward as I tried to understand what it was I was looking at. Were they the names of people that they had killed? People he had blackmailed or stalked? People he was having illicit relationships, or illicit business dealings with?

Michael clicked on one.

These were the names of people that had been ruined and whose companies had gone under. Every single one of them.

However, I had been wrong about everything else. None of this directly had anything to do with Travis or his brothers.

Every single bit of information on the ruination of these people and their companies was there, but it was not from when Travis was in charge but instead when his father had been in charge.

These were the list of people his father had hurt and while it would prove useful if we chose to publish it, it was not new information to the public that their father had hurt people, and it would do nothing to harm the Ross Brothers.

In every single file we had gone through, there was a bottom aspect of the file labeled ‘reparations’.

Some were labeled ‘reparations underway’ and others were labeled ‘reparations to be made’.

I took control from Michael, ignoring his usual rule about not letting anyone touch his computers as I went through more of the files to be certain that they all had labeling under it stating the same things.

“There’s no way,” Michael said as he nudged me aside. He immediately searched up his own name as I wondered what it was that he was up to.

His name appeared as one of the folders. I opened it to read it and saw that Michael’s mom had been a business woman. I looked at him after I had read the file. His mother’s company had gone down and I did not need the rest of the contents of the file to tell me that Travis’s father had been responsible for that.

“There’s no way, they are looking for me because they want to give me reparations?” he gasped in shock, causing me to look back at the screen. I read further, surprised to see that they had been looking for him.

“Look for me,” I said, my voice gravelly and thick from my warring emotions.

Michael typed in the name Skye and shook his head at her when he saw nothing. “I can’t find anything on Skye.”

“No, not Skye. Anderson. Search for Anderson.” My world was spinning.

He looked at me strangely but did not ask me why I had changed my name even though I knew he was curious. He typed the name into the search bar and clicked on it when it appeared.

I saw a picture of my father in the folder, along with details of his company and how the older Ross had caused ruin to his business.

I read everything that they wrote about his company and what had been done to him, and looked down to the label that read ‘reparations to be made’ and felt tears well up in my eyes.

He cared. Travis actually cared. It wasn’t just for show. Not when he’d encrypted this file so deep we’d barely been able to find it.

I remembered what he had told me the first time we met, when he had said that I seemed to have a bias against him and his family. That I seemed unwilling to give them a chance, even though I’d never met them and knew nothing about them.

I choked on a sob as I realized that he was completely right. That was exactly who I was. I had decided that the Ross brothers had to be evil simply because their father was. As though evil were something you inherited.

I was no different from anyone else who judged people based solely on their parentage. Now I had committed serious crimes because I was trying to find something that never existed. Trying to find proof of my prejudice. And soon he would know what I really was.

I could no longer fight the feelings I had for him. I had tried all I could to lock it all away and pretend that I did not feel anything for him but now that the dam had been broken and I had come to see the wrong I had done, I could not pretend anymore. More tears ran down my face as I struggled to get control of myself without success.

“I can’t believe this,” Michael said as he got up from the chair in front of his computers and proceeded to sit on the sofa instead.

He planted his head on his hands, his expressions clear to see. I understood what he was feeling as it was exactly what I felt myself. Apart from the feeling of love that was now blossoming, I also felt empty. All this time, this was the only thing that had been driving me for years but now there was no more purpose, everything had vanished in front of my eyes.

Jonathan’s investment would be for nought. If the spreadsheet was accurate, Michael and I would both have money coming?from Travis Ross. But that was the least of my problems now that I had seduced him and broken into a mega-corporation’s secure servers in my determination to prove that he was evil.

Struck by a sudden idea, I searched for Jonathan’s name in Travis’s secret file. Nothing came up.

I shrugged. Maybe the Rosses hadn’t found Jonathan yet. Maybe he’d changed his name, like I did when my mother remarried. Maybe his daughter had never shared his surname in the first place and so he hadn’t come up in their search.

I took a deep breath, knowing what I needed to do next. I needed to tell Jonathan that he didn’t have a story.