Chapter 2 - The Audit
The rental car smelled faintly of artificial lemon and stale vinyl. Lauren gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white as she navigated the damp, gray streets of downtown Chicago. The supplier crisis at the Michigan Avenue development site was supposed to be the hardest thing on her plate this week. Instead, it was merely background noise to the quiet war now raging inside her head.
She checked into her hotel room by late afternoon, the space sterile and lonely. The king-sized bed mocked her with its crisp, empty sheets.
Instead of resting, Lauren opened her laptop on the glass desk.
She didn't call Andrew. He had tried calling her four times during the descent into O'Hare, each missed call registering like a digital heartbeat of panic. She let every single one go to voicemail.
Instead, she logged into the secure remote portal for Carter-Mitchell Real Estate.
As the Chief Operations Officer, she had master-keyed access to every digital ledger, HR file, and internal audit trail the firm possessed. For years, she had trusted Andrew’s side of the business—client acquisitions, high-net-worth networking, and regional expansion—entirely on faith. Faith was a luxury she could no longer afford.
She typed in her authentication keys, bypassing two-factor security protocols with her executive credentials. She began pulling expense reports for the past year, cross-referencing Andrew’s travel logs with corporate credit card statements.
At first, everything looked standard. Flights to Boston, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco. High-end dinners, luxury hotels, client entertainment.
Then she filtered the search by employee ID: Bennett, Chloe.
The breath caught in Lauren’s throat.
For the past eight months, nearly every single trip Andrew claimed was a solo executive venture to the East Coast actually coincided with identical flight bookings for Chloe Bennett. Not only that, but the hotel accommodations told a far more intimate story. Connecting rooms in Boston. Suite upgrades in San Francisco. And worse—three distinct charges from a high-end boutique jewelry store in downtown Manhattan, billed to the corporate account under “client appreciation gifts,” dated two days before their seventh wedding anniversary.
Lauren stared at the invoice on her screen, the numbers blurring behind a sudden rush of hot, angry tears that she blinked away with fierce resolve.
It wasn't just an affair. It was an embezzlement of trust, funded by the very company she had sacrificed her twenties and thirties to build from the ground up.
Her phone buzzed violently against the desk.
It wasn't Andrew this time. It was a text message from her father, Thomas Mitchell, the retired senior partner of the firm who still held a controlling twenty-five percent voting share.
“Saw the corporate credit alerts on the shared accounts, Lauren. Why is Andrew expensing luxury suites at the Drake in Chicago for Chloe Bennett? Call me immediately.”
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Lauren stared at the screen, the cold realization washing over her that the secret was already out of Andrew's hands—and her father was already moving in for the kill.
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