Chapter 2 - The Audit Trail
The leather interior of the town car smelled of rain and cedarwood, but I couldn't shake the chill clinging to my skin. As Leo navigated the downtown traffic toward the Prescott Technologies headquarters on Market Street, my phone buzzed continuously. Three missed calls from Aaron. Two frantic text messages from his mother demanding to know why the corporate catering account in Geneva had suddenly been frozen by the bank.
I ignored them all.
When the car slid beneath the subterranean parking garage of our building, I didn't wait for Leo to open the door. I stepped out into the fluorescent-lit concrete cavern, my heels clicking sharply against the pavement. The private elevator—the one programmed only to recognize my biometric thumbprint and Aaron’s—whirred to life the moment I pressed my finger to the glass scanner.
The penthouse office suite occupied the entire top floor of the tower. During the day, it offered a panoramic view of the city skyline; tonight, it looked like a dark, echoing monument to an empire built on quicksand. The overhead lights flickered on automatically as I entered, illuminating the minimalist desk of bleached oak where Aaron spent twelve hours a day pretending he was a self-made visionary.
I walked straight to his private terminal, bypassing the guest seating area where Jasmine had left a discarded tube of designer lip gloss. Setting my bag down, I connected my master administrative drive to the primary server port. If Aaron was hiding a shell company behind a web of compliance consulting, the local server cache would still hold the unencrypted email drafts, the initial legal incorporation documents, and the digital paper trail he thought he had successfully scrubbed.
Within three minutes, the decryption algorithm bypassed the secondary firewall.
A cascading waterfall of files appeared on the screen. Most were standard engineering specs and marketing decks, but as I filtered the search results by recipient and date, a darker picture emerged. There were dozens of encrypted correspondence files between Aaron and a corporate restructuring attorney named Marcus Vance—a lawyer notorious for helping founders systematically strip marital assets before filing for strategic divorces.
My breath hitched. It wasn't just an affair. It was an exit strategy.
Aaron hadn't brought Jasmine onto the executive team simply for convenience or late-night code reviews. She was Vance’s niece. Her presence in the office, her seat on the jet, the public humiliations designed to push me toward an emotional breakdown—they were all calculated moves. They wanted me to look unstable, irrational, and difficult, providing them with a fabricated narrative of an abandoned, overbearing wife who couldn't handle the pressures of high society.
"I see you found the reading material."
The voice came from the doorway, smooth and entirely devoid of surprise.
I spun around. Marcus Vance himself stood in the private entryway, leaning casually against the doorframe. He wore an expensive charcoal suit, his silver-rimmed glasses catching the harsh fluorescent light overhead. He hadn't buzzed up; he clearly had a keycard of his own.
"You’re trespassing, Marcus," I said, my voice steady as I rested my hand casually near the edge of the desk, shielding the screen from his view.
"Technically, Mrs. Prescott, I’m consulting," Vance replied, walking slowly into the room, his shoes making no sound on the thick wool rug. "And I have to say, you’ve managed to cause quite a stir in Geneva before my clients even finished their appetizers. The Swiss bank account associated with Alpine Ventures has been locked."
"You expected me to just sit quietly in row five while your niece played CEO?" I asked, rising to my feet to meet him eye-to-eye.
Vance smiled, a thin, patronizing curve of his lips that reminded me entirely too much of Aaron’s mother. "Jasmine is ambitious. Young people often overestimate their speed. But let’s not pretend this is about an office romance, Alyssa. Aaron wants a clean slate. Prescott Technologies is valued at nearly four billion dollars now. When you funded the seed round four years ago, it was a failing startup with three employees. Times have changed. The legal framework surrounding that initial trust transfer... well, let's just say a clever litigator could argue it was an unsecured loan, not equity."
The sheer audacity of the threat hung heavily in the room. He was telling me that not only were they stealing the current revenue streams, but they were planning to strip me of the original equity stake that made the company possible in the first place.
"Is that what Aaron told you?" I asked quietly. "That I’d just hand over four years of my life and a billion-dollar stake without a fight?"
"Aaron didn't have to tell me anything," Vance said, taking another step closer. "He’s exhausted, Alyssa. He feels suffocated by your family’s shadow. He built this company with his own hands, and every time someone looks at him, they see your father’s money. He deserves to be a free man."
"My father’s money kept the lights on when Aaron was eating ramen off a hot plate," I snapped, the ice in my veins finally cracking into pure, unfiltered fury. "And if he thinks he can erase that history with a shell company and a hired attorney, he’s about to find out exactly how much gravity my family's shadow actually has."
Vance didn't flinch. Instead, he reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a folded manila envelope, and laid it gently on the center of the oak desk.
"Before you declare war, Mrs. Prescott, you might want to look at what was filed in the family court archives three hours ago. A petition for temporary restraining order and asset freeze. Filed under your name."
I stared at the envelope, the room suddenly spinning around me. "What are you talking about? I didn't file anything."
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"Of course you didn't," Vance said smoothly, turning toward the exit. "Your signature was verified through your digital biometric app. The one linked to your personal iPad. The one left unattended on the private jet this morning."
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