Chapter 2 - The Panic in the Penthouse
Back on East Fifty-Seventh Street, Grant Hollowell’s world was fracturing along lines he had spent five years meticulously calcifying.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, his phone pressed against his ear, listening to the monotonous, rhythmic beep of Leah’s disconnected mobile line. He threw the phone against the Italian tile backsplash. It shattered into a spiderweb of black glass and lithium batteries, sliding down to rest against the baseboard.
"Damn it!" Grant roared, his voice bouncing off the granite and stainless steel with an ugly, resonant violence.
Sloan Mercer stood in the doorway of the master suite, wrapped in one of Grant’s silk robes, her mascara slightly smudged from where she had rushed over after receiving his frantic, incoherent text message.
"Grant, what is happening?" Sloan asked, her voice sharp with sudden anxiety. "Your doorman looked at me like I was a ghost when I came up the private elevator. He said Leah’s bags were gone. What do you mean she took the files?"
Grant turned on her, his face pale, his immaculate hair disheveled from where he had repeatedly dragged his hands through it.
"She didn't just take files, Sloan," he hissed, stepping toward her with his fists clenched. "She accessed the root directory. She downloaded the Aegis ledger. Every offshore transfer, every shell account, every transaction linking your cousin’s clinic to my personal holding trust—she has it all on an encrypted partition."
Sloan’s face drained of color, the sophisticated facade cracking instantly. "That’s impossible. You said the network was secure. You said she didn't even know how to open a terminal prompt!"
"She's a graphic designer!" Grant yelled, pacing the length of the kitchen floor like a caged predator. "She built interface architecture before we got married! I forgot—God help me, I completely underestimated what she was capable of when she wasn't weighed down by exhaustion and pregnancy hormones!"
"If she takes that to the SEC, or worse, to the federal prosecutor handling the health board investigations..." Sloan stopped, her fingers digging into the fabric of the silk robe. "We’re done. You’ll lose your partnership, your assets will be seized under the RICO statutes, and I’ll be doing twenty years in a federal penitentiary for wire fraud."
"Don't talk to me about federal prison," Grant snapped, grabbing his car keys from the counter. "I have to find her before she reaches a lawyer. If she files for divorce with those documents attached to the petition as evidence of financial endangerment, the judge will freeze every single account we own within two hours."
"Where would she go?" Sloan asked, stepping into the kitchen light. "She has no family in the city. Her parents died years ago, her brother is living in London, and she’s eight months pregnant—she can’t travel far."
Grant paused, his keys jingling in his white-knuckled grip as a dark, calculating expression settled over his features.
"She doesn't have family," Grant murmured, realization dawning with chilling precision. "Not in the city. But she has that old estate in Newport. Her uncle Richard still lives in Rhode Island—a retired federal judge who despises me."
May you like
Grant grabbed his coat from the hook by the door.
"Pack your things, Sloan," he ordered coldly. "And wipe your hard drives. We’re going on offense."
