Chapter 6 - Unraveling the Web
Grant leaned heavily against the foyer wall, his hand clutching his chest as if he were having a physical heart attack. The arrogance that had sustained him for years was completely dismantled. Every escape route had been mapped, anticipated, and sealed shut months before he ever walked through the door this morning.
“How?” Grant gasped, his voice cracked and pathetic. “How did you find out about the accounts? Iris didn't have access to the offshore numbers. Nobody had those passwords except me and—”
He stopped dead, his eyes darting toward Celeste.
Celeste shrank back, shaking her head frantically. “Grant, I swear! I never gave anyone your laptop passwords! I didn't say anything!”
“She didn't have to,” Iris Chen said, taking a step forward. “You used your company-issued phone to log into your personal cloud storage while connected to the Bellamy executive Wi-Fi network. You thought using a private browsing window protected you. But because Evelyn’s family trust owns the digital infrastructure of the building, every packet of encrypted data that passed through that router was automatically archived onto the primary server. You handed over your passwords every single time you connected to check your balances.”
Grant looked at me, horror etched into every line of his face. “You set a trap for me at my own office.”
“You set the trap, Grant. I just preserved the evidence,” I replied. “When you started staying out late two years ago, claiming you were closing critical mergers, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. When you began treating me like an unpaid housekeeper, I stayed quiet, hoping you were just under stress. But when I found the jewelry receipt for a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond necklace that never appeared in my jewelry box, I realized who you truly were.”
I walked over to the console table and picked up Iris’s folder, turning the pages slowly.
“I hired Rebecca the very next day. And when Iris reached out to me after you tried to destroy her life, we joined forces. For the last six months, Iris has been working directly for the Vance Family Trust as our chief financial auditor. Every move you made, every transfer you signed, every lie you told Celeste about your wealth and your future—we watched it in real time.”
Celeste covered her face with her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. “He told me his wife was crazy! He told me she was an agoraphobic spendthrift who refused to let him see his kids! He told me he was the only one holding the family together!”
“He lied to you to stroke his own fragile ego, Celeste,” I said, looking at her with a mixture of pity and contempt. “He needed someone young, naive, and greedy enough to believe he was a king. Because here, in this house, he knew he was nothing more than a guest living on my family’s charity.”
Arthur Bell checked his gold pocket watch. “The local police cruiser should be pulling into the driveway right now, along with two squad cars from the county sheriff's department. Grant, you have ten minutes to gather your personal clothing from the guest room. Anything purchased with corporate funds or funds from the Vance Trust stays here.”
“Ten minutes?” Grant’s mother shrieked, finally rushing forward from the living room. “Arthur, please! This is his home! It’s Christmas Day! Have some mercy! Where is he supposed to go? Where are we supposed to go?”
May you like
“You, Eleanor, can take your husband and return to your own home in the suburbs,” Arthur replied without an ounce of sympathy. “The home, I might add, that Grant illegally used as collateral on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar private bridge loan to cover his first audit deficit. If you want to keep your house, I suggest you retain a very good bankruptcy attorney by Monday morning.”
Eleanor let out a sharp cry and collapsed against Richard, who looked like a broken, hollow shell of a man.
