Chapter 14 - SEVENTEEN HOURS
We spent the night fighting on three fronts.
Rachel filed emergency motions.
Detective Shah coordinated warrants.
My father and Julian prepared sworn statements that would blow open the company’s history.
I went to the flagship store.
The same place where Nathan hit me.
This time the doors opened for me.
Employees watched silently as I walked to the executive office and accessed the transaction archive under police supervision.
There it was.
The forged authorization.
The scanner logs showed Celeste had uploaded it.
But the biometric approval had come from a device assigned to me.
A device that disappeared two years earlier during my honeymoon.
Nathan had reported it lost.
I called him from the store.
He answered from protective custody.
“Where is my old security token?”
Silence.
“Nathan.”
“Celeste took it.”
“She says Charles made her.”
“He did.”
“Where is it now?”
“I don’t know.”
Then Celeste, sitting with federal agents upstairs, requested to speak with me.
She looked exhausted.
“I know where Charles is going.”
“Where?”
“The old Vale cutting house in Newark. There’s a private server beneath it. Your mother built it before cloud storage. Charles never shut it down.”
“What does he keep there?”
“Everything he can’t afford to let a court see.”
Detective Shah assembled a team.
Before they left, Celeste caught my sleeve.
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Charles didn’t order Nathan to marry you.”
“Who did?”
Her face went tight.
“My mother.”
I stared at her.
“Evelyn chose Nathan.”
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“Why?”
Celeste whispered, “Because she thought marrying you to someone Charles controlled was the only way to keep him from choosing someone worse.”
