I didn’t yell. I asked him, my voice trembling, who Sloane Kensington was.
Richard didn’t flinch. He walked over, picked up the papers, and slowly tore them into halves, then quarters.
“You’re invading my privacy, Caroline,” he said, his tone chillingly flat. “These are corporate expenses for a client. You wouldn’t understand the structure.”
“There’s a receipt for a diamond tennis bracelet, Richard. What client requires a tennis bracelet?”
He stepped closer, looming over me. The warmth of his body felt suddenly dangerous. “You are becoming unhinged,” he whispered, his eyes dark and empty. “Look at yourself. You’re shaking. You’re paranoid. If you ever, ever, breach my private firm documents again, I will have you committed. Do you understand me? Who do you think a judge will believe? The CEO of Sterling Capital, or a hormonal housewife having a paranoid break?”
The next morning, all my credit cards were declined. The passwords to our joint accounts were changed. The household staff stopped looking me in the eye. Eleanor Sterling called to tell me that if I embarrassed her son with my “baseless jealousy,” she would personally ensure I never saw the inside of Manhattan society—or my own child—again.
They thought they had trapped a songbird in a golden cage. They thought I would just sit on the perch and weep.
But as I sat alone in that silent, sterile penthouse, feeling the baby kick against my ribs, the initial terror evaporated, leaving behind a cold, hard diamond of absolute rage.
If Richard wanted to play a game of corporate warfare, he had forgotten one crucial detail.
I was the auditor.
I waited until midnight, when the private security detail changed shifts in the lobby. I slipped out of the penthouse, took the private elevator down to the sub-basement of the building, and approached the reinforced steel door of the Sterling family’s physical archives.
A place Richard hadn’t visited in ten years.
I punched in the four-digit code—his grandfather’s birth year. The heavy door clicked open, and I stepped into the dark, pulling the door shut behind me. The lock engaged with a heavy, final thud.
The archive room smelled of dry rot, leather binding, and the metallic tang of old money. It was a sprawling, climate-controlled bunker lined with steel shelving, housing a century’s worth of Sterling family secrets, tax returns, and original corporate charters. The only sound was the low, steady hum of the dehumidifier in the corner.
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