Chapter 4 - The Paper Trail
By late afternoon, the panic inside the penthouse had reached a fever pitch.
Grant slammed his phone onto the marble kitchen island, his hands trembling with a rage he hadn't felt in a decade. Eleanor stood by the living room window, nervously wrapping a silk scarf around her wrist.
"What do you mean, your cards are declined?" Eleanor asked, her voice sharp with sudden anxiety.
"I mean the corporate accounts are frozen!" Grant snapped, pacing across the hardwood floor like a caged animal. "Catherine—that vulture—has locked every single line of credit. She’s auditing the subsidiary transfers from the last six months. If she finds the shell company we set up for the Apex down payment..."
He didn't finish the sentence. The shell company—a private vehicle he and Eleanor had quietly established to siphon off intellectual property before the merger—was supposed to be invisible. It was designed to look like a routine vendor expense. But Catherine wasn't a standard corporate auditor; she spent her entire career dismantling fraudulent corporate structures for European conglomerates.
"Calm down," Eleanor said, though her own face was pale. "It's just a temporary injunction. Seventy-two hours. You're still Grant Holloway. You can appeal to a judge. You can claim Victoria was manipulating the trust terms while incapacitated."
"A judge?" Grant laughed bitterly, stopping his pacing to stare at her. "Do you know who the emergency family court judge on duty is this week? Judge Evelyn Vance. No relation to Marcus, but she’s notorious for protecting maternal inheritance rights. She won't even look at my petition if she thinks I abandoned my wife and three premature babies in an ICU."
Eleanor’s eyes narrowed, the smooth facade of the confident corporate climber cracking just enough to reveal her own self-interest. "Then you need to fix it with Victoria."
Grant stopped dead in his tracks. "Fix it? With Victoria?"
"Go to the hospital," Eleanor urged, her voice dropping into a tactical whisper. "Play the frantic, remorseful husband. Tell her it was a misunderstanding, a stress-induced panic attack. Get her to sign a waiver revoking the trust freeze. Once the accounts unlock and the Apex acquisition goes through, we can refile the divorce on our own terms."
Grant stared at her as if she had suggested jumping off the balcony. Pride—the same towering, fragile pride that had fueled his entire career—revolted against the idea. Groveling to Victoria? Admitting defeat? Standing in front of the woman he had just tried to discard like expired milk and asking for mercy?
"I can't go back there," Grant muttered, shaking his head. "You don't know how she looks when she's quiet. She doesn't yell. She just... calculates."
"If you don't go," Eleanor said coldly, walking over to the entryway and picking up her designer handbag, "you won't have a company left to run by tomorrow morning. And I am not hitching my career to a sinking ship."
Grant watched her freeze at the door. The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow: Eleanor wasn't loyal to him. She was loyal to his success. The moment the money stopped, she was ready to walk out the exact same way he had walked out of the hospital ICU.
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He had wanted a clean escape, but the trap had simply shifted from Victoria to himself.
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