He betrayed his self-sacrificing wife for a gold-digging mistress. Coming home three days early from a business trip, he was left stunned seeing how cruelly she was actually treating his own mother!

The safehouse was a nondescript apartment in the industrial district. Inside, Marcus sat at a table littered with printouts, alongside a rugged man in a leather jacket—Vance, the investigator.

Daniel slammed the forged folder onto the table. "Tell me what you found."

Vance didn't waste words. He turned a laptop toward Daniel, displaying a web of financial transactions. "Your mistress isn't just a gold-digger, Daniel. She’s a professional. Her real name isn't Vanessa DuPont. It's Vanessa Jenkins. Five years ago, she did the exact same thing to an aging real estate mogul in Chicago. He ended up in a nursing home with dementia, and she walked away with three million dollars before the family could sue."

Daniel sank into a chair, his face pale. "How did she get into my company's backend?"

"She didn't do it alone," Marcus interjected, his eyes burning with anger. "She had inside help. We traced the digital access tokens. Someone gave her the master encryption keys to your finance department."

"Who?" Daniel demanded.

"Your Chief Financial Officer, Julian," Vance replied. "Turns out, Julian and Vanessa have been seeing each other long before she ever met you. She was the bait. You were the target. They’ve already drained nearly two million from your reserve accounts under the guise of 'marketing expenditures.' This forged document in your hand? It was the final blow. Once this share transfer is logged in the corporate registry tomorrow morning, they take controlling interest of your board."

Daniel buried his face in his hands. The company his father had built, the company Claire had worked eighty-hour weeks to save when they were on the brink of bankruptcy—he had handed it over to a pair of thieves because of a pretty face and sweet lies.

"How do we stop them?" Daniel asked, his voice dead.

"We don't stop the filing," Marcus said, a cold smile touching his lips. "We let them file it. If we stop it now, they flee with the two million they already stole. But if they file a forged federal document to hijack a corporate entity, it becomes an FBI matter. Grand larceny, wire fraud, and identity theft."

"But what about my mother?" Daniel asked, panicked. "She’s alone in the house with her right now."