Chapter 11
REID
Footsteps faded down the corridor, muffled by the acoustic dampening panels, until nothing remained but ringing silence.
Gwen was gone. The frosted glass door had clicked shut in her wake, sealing me inside the corner office with the wreckage of my own life. I stood entirely paralyzed behind my massive desk, my hand still gripping the edge of the wood so tightly my knuckles ached.
I know what you and Victoria Albright have been doing behind closed doors.
My lungs refused to expand. The oxygen in the executive suite felt thin, scraped away by the terrifying, unyielding finality in my wife’s voice.
She hadn't screamed. She hadn't thrown anything.
She had simply looked at me across the room with a gaze full of hurt and pain, delivered her eviction notice, and walked away.
I stared at the empty space where she had just been standing. My brain, ruthlessly conditioned to process variables and spit out solutions, ground violently against this new influx of reality.
Stringing both of us along. Sleeping with your consultant. Using me as a PR shield.
The pieces of the equation finally snapped into place, interlocking with a sickening, audible click.
Victoria.
My mind flashed back to the penthouse. I saw Victoria stepping off my private elevator in that emerald silk slip dress.
I remembered the cloying, aggressive musk of her perfume, the predatory confidence in her eyes, and the sheer, staggering audacity of her assuming I was ready to fall into bed with her.
I had thrown her out. I had threatened her reputation and banished her from my personal life.
She hadn't accepted defeat. She had escalated.
Realizing her seductive ambush had failed, Victoria had immediately pivoted her strategy.
If she couldn't convince me to leave my wife, she would convince my wife to leave me. She had driven out to the island, weaponized the intimate details of my work schedule, and fabricated an affair with enough plausibility to completely obliterate Gwen’s remaining trust.
Shock evaporated from my bloodstream. It didn't fade; it was instantly incinerated, replaced by a surge of pure wrath.
I didn't reach for the intercom to page HR. Human Resources handled severance packages and polite corporate transitions. This was not a transition. This was an eradication.
Snatching my cell phone off the desk, I bypassed my assistant entirely and dialed a secure internal number. The line rang exactly once before it was answered.
“Franken,” the voice on the other end answered, crisp and alert. Jared Franken was my head of private security, a former intelligence operative who managed everything from corporate espionage protocols to my personal travel details.
"I need a complete, invasive forensic teardown on Victoria Albright," I ordered, my voice dropping into an unrecognizable register.
"I don't want the sanitized corporate background check she submitted when we agreed to work with her.
I want her personal financials. I want her hidden accounts, her credit lines, her text logs, and her private history.
Pull her building access logs. I want every single stone in her life turned over and brought to my desk. "
Franken didn't hesitate or ask for context. "Timeframe?"
"One hour," I told him, staring blindly out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the gray Seattle skyline. "Do whatever it takes. Pull the entire security division off their current assignments. Dig until you find the fracture."
"Understood. One hour." Franken disconnected.
I dropped the phone onto the desk.
For the next sixty minutes, I paced the length of the corner office like a caged predator.
I didn't look at the Tacoma plant blueprints.
I didn't review the expansion contracts sitting in my inbox.
My entire empire felt profoundly irrelevant compared to the blistering realization of my own arrogance.
I had let this happen.
I had been so obsessively focused on building Mitchell Energy, so entirely consumed by the intoxicating momentum of my own success, that I had left the gates to my life completely unguarded.
I had allowed Victoria to blur the professional boundaries because she was efficient, because she understood the data, because she kept the machinery moving.
I had valued her output over my wife’s emotional safety.
I had essentially handed a saboteur a map to my weaknesses and invited her inside the walls.
The digital clock on my desk ticked forward.
Fifty-eight minutes after I made the call, the glass door to my office swung open.
Franken walked in. He was a broad-shouldered man in a tailored dark suit, his expression a mask of professional neutrality.
He carried a slim encrypted tablet in his hand and a manila folder filled with a small stack of papers.
He crossed the room, bypassing the guest chairs, and placed the device and the folder directly onto my desk.
"You were right to ask for the deep dive," Franken said quietly, tapping the screen to unlock the file. "The background she presented to us was a meticulously constructed house of cards. The pedigree is entirely manufactured."
I stopped pacing and walked around the desk, staring down at the glowing screen. "Show me."
"She positioned herself as an established industry insider," Franken began, swiping through a series of scanned financial documents and flagged bank records.
"She projected old family money, elite social circles, and independent wealth.
None of it is real. She grew up lower-middle class in Nevada.
Her entire socialite persona is a grift funded by a catastrophic amount of high-interest debt. "
I leaned over the desk, my eyes scanning the staggering numbers highlighted in red on the tablet.
"She is drowning," Franken continued, his tone clinical.
"She has been taking out massive, predatory personal loans just to pay the minimum balances on older debts. The designer clothes, the leased luxury vehicles, the penthouse apartment downtown—it’s all leveraged to the hilt.
She is running a shell game with three different banks to keep up appearances and maintain her access to elite corporate circles. "
My jaw tightened. The pieces were finally coming together, forming a clear, undeniable motive.
"She was running out of runway," I murmured, staring at a notice of impending default from a private wealth management firm.
"Exactly," Franken confirmed. "Her credit is entirely maxed out.
These lenders were preparing to initiate asset seizure proceedings by the end of the quarter.
She didn't believe in the vision of this company, Reid.
She targeted you because you are an ascending billionaire with a liquid portfolio. She was looking for a bailout."
The sheer, calculated malice of her plan crystallized in my mind.
Victoria hadn't just developed an inappropriate crush on her boss.
This was a targeted financial strike. She had intended to blow up my marriage, isolate me from my support system, and hitch herself to my bank accounts before her own fraudulent lifestyle collapsed underneath her.
She viewed Gwen not as a romantic rival, but as a financial obstacle standing between her and a limitless credit limit.
"Thank you, Franken,” I said, my voice eerily calm. "Wait outside. Have my assistant send for Victoria."
Franken gave a brief nod, retrieved the tablet, and exited the room.
I walked over to my leather chair and sat down. I smoothed my tie, pulled on the sleeve of my suit jacket, and arranged my posture into a portrait of relaxed, executive authority. I let my face go completely blank, burying the white-hot rage beneath layers of polished, impenetrable ice.
An hour later later, the glass door opened again.
Victoria stepped into the office. She was back in her corporate armor today, wearing a razor-sharp cream blazer and a tailored pencil skirt. She closed the door behind her and turned to face me, a perfectly calibrated expression of sympathetic concern painted across her face.
She walked toward the desk, likely expecting to find a broken, devastated man reeling from his wife's demand for a divorce. She expected me to be desperate for an ally, ready to lean on the only person who supposedly understood the crushing pressure of my position.
"Your assistant said you needed to see me immediately," Victoria said softly, taking a seat in one of the leather guest chairs without waiting for an invitation.
She crossed her legs, resting her hands neatly in her lap.
"Reid, I saw Gwen leave the building. You look terrible. Is there anything I can do?"
"You can drop the act," I replied, my voice slicing through the quiet room with the precision of a scalpel.
Victoria blinked, her sympathetic smile freezing in place. "Excuse me?"
I opened the manila folder and pulled out the printed hard copies Franken had left for me. I tossed the thick stack of financial records, loan defaults, and flagged credit statements across the polished mahogany. The papers fanned out directly in front of her.
"You presented yourself as an elite asset," I said, leaning back in my chair and watching her carefully. "You sold my board on a narrative of established wealth and industry pedigree. It turns out you are just a common grifter who leased a personality she couldn't afford."
Victoria’s gaze dropped to the documents.
All the color instantly drained from her face, leaving her skin an ashen, sickly gray.
Her carefully constructed facade fractured, exposing the sheer, panicked desperation underneath.
She reached out with a trembling hand, her manicured fingers hovering over a bank statement displaying a massive, six-figure deficit.