Chapter 5 - The Rat in a Trap
The dress arrived at my office at 9:00 AM the next morning, delivered by a frantic courier. It was wrapped in plastic, perfectly dry-cleaned, and accompanied by a handwritten note from Chloe begging me to leave her out of the FBI investigation.
I threw the note in the shredder and hung the emerald dress in my private closet. It was a small victory, but the war was far from over.
Marcus was desperate. His agency was drowning, his mistress had turned on him, and he was staring down a massive lawsuit from my mother's estate. He needed a lifeline, a massive infusion of cash to pay back the four million he owed before the authorities officially indicted him.
I decided to give him one. A poisoned one.
Through a proxy—a shell company Mr. Sterling set up—we leaked a "confidential" tip to Marcus. A massive, derelict industrial complex on the edge of the city was secretly being rezoned for luxury residential development. If someone bought it now for five million, it would be worth fifty million in six months.
It was exactly the kind of arrogant, insider-trading shortcut Marcus lived for.
He bit hard. Desperate to save himself, Marcus liquidated everything. He emptied his remaining personal accounts, took out high-interest loans from unsavory private lenders, and leveraged the remaining equity in his dying PR firm.
He purchased the property for five and a half million dollars, confident he had outsmarted me and secured his financial comeback.
The day the deed transferred to his name, the city council publicly announced that the land was not being rezoned for residential. In fact, it had just been declared an EPA toxic superfund site due to historical chemical dumping. The buyer was legally responsible for the thirty-million-dollar environmental cleanup.
Marcus hadn't bought a gold mine. He had bought a financial black hole that would legally bankrupt him for the rest of his life.
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When he realized what had happened, he stormed into my corporate lobby, screaming my name until security tackled him to the marble floor. I watched from the glass balcony of the second floor as the police dragged my ex-husband out in handcuffs, his face twisted in rage and absolute despair.
I didn't feel sad. I didn't feel angry. I just felt clean.
