Chapter 3 - The Counter-Strike
“What are you talking about?” I asked, staring at Rebecca.
Rebecca closed the manila folder with a crisp, authoritative snap and walked over to the patio table, picking up her phone. “Marcus Vance thinks he’s the smartest operator in the room. He thinks because he plays dirty, nobody else knows how the game works. But he made one fatal mistake: he assumed Audrey was loyal to him, and he assumed I was an oblivious suburban housewife who would scream, file for divorce, and blow your life apart the moment I saw another woman touching you.”
Audrey lifted her head, her face blotchy, her eyes wide with shock. “Rebecca... you knew from the beginning?”
“I knew the moment Marcus’s shell company wired the first settlement extension to your creditor,” Rebecca said coldly. “You aren't subtle, Audrey. You’ve never been good with secrets. You leave trails everywhere you walk.”
Rebecca turned her screen toward me. On it was an active audio recording app. The timer was running; it had been recording for the last forty-five minutes, capturing every single word spoken in the backyard—Audrey’s tearful confession, the specific mention of Marcus buying her debt, the extortion, and the staged pool incident.
“Marcus didn’t just hire a photographer,” Rebecca explained, looking back toward the fence line. “He hired Gary Briggs, an independent private investigator based out of Fishers. What Marcus doesn’t know is that Gary Briggs owes his entire commercial license to my corporate firm. We represent his biggest agency client. When Gary realized who he was being paid to photograph, he called me two nights ago.”
My jaw slackened. “Gary told you?”
“Gary is a mercenary, but he isn’t an idiot,” Rebecca said smoothly. “He knows the difference between a standard messy divorce case and criminal corporate extortion. He sent the photos of you and Audrey in the pool directly to Marcus five minutes ago, just as Marcus instructed. But Marcus doesn’t know that the telephoto lens also captured Audrey handing over a flash drive twenty minutes before you even stepped outside—a flash drive that contains zero illicit photos, but a whole lot of Marcus’s encrypted communication logs that Audrey downloaded from his private portal when he was coercing her.”
I turned to Audrey, my brow furrowed. “You gave him files on Marcus?”
Audrey wiped her cheeks with the back of her trembling hand, nodding weakly. “I... I couldn't go through with destroying you, Nolan. I swear to God, I couldn't. Last night, I broke down. I came into the kitchen to tell you everything, but Rebecca caught me in the hallway. She told me she already knew about the debt. She told me that if I followed her exact script today, played the part Marcus wanted so he would believe his plan worked, she would protect me.”
“You scripted this?” I looked at Rebecca, a mixture of awe and profound unease washing over me. “The whole thing? The lesson, the slipping on the steps, the panic?”
“Audrey needed to look convincing for the telephoto lens,” Rebecca said without a trace of remorse. “If she hesitated, Marcus would suspect she had flipped. He needed to believe he had the kill shot. Right now, Marcus is sitting in his penthouse office downtown, looking at high-resolution images of your sister-in-law clinging to you in a pool, believing he holds your entire life in his hands.”
“And what does that give us?” I asked, my voice steadying as the adrenaline shifted from panic to razor-sharp focus.
“Leverage,” Rebecca whispered, her eyes gleaming with predatory intensity. “Absolute, unassailable leverage. Marcus didn’t just breach your partnership agreement. He engaged in interstate wire fraud, extortion, and corporate sabotage to manipulate the value of a publicly discussed tech acquisition. In Indiana, that isn’t just a civil tort. That’s federal racketeering territory.”
She walked over to me, placing a hand on my damp shoulder. Her touch was possessive, calculating, yet unmistakably supportive. “Tomorrow morning, Marcus called an emergency preliminary meeting with our legal counsel, claiming he has ‘urgent moral grounds’ to demand your immediate resignation before next week’s buyout vote. He thinks he’s going to ambuscade you. He thinks you’ll be blindsided, terrified of a public sex scandal, and sign away your shares for nothing just to keep my name out of the papers.”
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“And instead,” I murmured, the full scope of Rebecca’s brilliant, ruthless game finally becoming clear to me, “we’re walking into that boardroom with his entire life in a folder.”
“Exactly,” Rebecca said, her lips curling into a triumphant smile. “Now go inside, Nolan. Take a hot shower, put on your best Italian suit, and let’s prepare Marcus Vance’s execution.”
