Chapter 5 - The Unraveling of Bianca Ravel
While Adrian picked his wedding ring up from the hallway floor—I watched through the fisheye peephole as he finally bent down to retrieve it with shaking fingers—Bianca Ravel was discovering that loyalty among conspirators is remarkably short-lived.
The morning after Adrian's visit, my phone buzzed with an encrypted message from an unknown number. Attached was a PDF file and a short note.
If you're going to destroy them, you might as well use their own ammunition. - B.
I opened the document. It was a complete, unredacted ledger of every illegal kickback, shell company transfer, and backdoor bribe executed between Arthur Ravel's zoning firm, Genevieve Arden’s real estate holdings, and Adrian’s consulting accounts over the last four years.
Bianca had ratted them out.
When she realized that Arden Holdings was going down in flames and that Adrian was legally bankrupt, she hadn't waited for loyalty to save her. She had downloaded her uncle's master server logs, packaged them neatly, and handed them to the person most likely to use them with maximum efficiency: me.
I forwarded the file directly to Marisol with a single line of text: Verify and attach to the federal filing.
By noon, the financial crimes unit of the provincial police had executed search warrants at Arthur Ravel’s residential address and seized the corporate archives of Ravel Development.
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Bianca’s calculated betrayal was complete. She had traded her sugar daddy for immunity, throwing both Adrian and her uncle under the bus to save her own skin. It was cold, ruthless, and entirely predictable.
I almost smiled. She really was an Arden after all.
