MÓJ TELEFON ZAWIBRAŁ, UTRZYMANY U MAMY NA OBIAD. KOCHAM CIĘ. SPOJRZAŁAM W GÓRĘ – BYŁ TRZY STOLIKI DALEJ, PRZESUWAŁ SIĘ…

Lead consultant: Marissa Vale, Veil Orchard Consulting.

I stopped walking.

People bumped into me, grumbling as they navigated around my frozen figure on the sidewalk.

But I did not feel them.

I stared at the screen until the pixels seemed to burn into my retinas.

Marissa Vale.

The woman in the red dress.

The woman taking my husband’s money.

She was not just a mistress.

She was not just a random consultant he had met at a bar.

She was coming into Northline.

She was coming into my company.

She was taking over my project.

The air left my lungs.

The pieces slammed together in my mind with the force of a train wreck.

The envelope.

The wax seal.

The deal they were celebrating.

It was not just about their relationship.

It was about this.

Ethan knew the city project was my career-defining achievement.

He knew every detail of it because I had told him.

I had told him about the difficult council members.

I had told him about the compliance hurdles.

He had fed that information to her.

He had coached her.

He had funded her LLC so she would look legitimate enough to bid on the consulting contract.

And now she was walking through the front door of my office to supervise my work.

This was not a love affair.

This was a hostile takeover.

My hand shook as I held the phone.

I felt a surge of nausea, followed immediately by a cold, white-hot rage.

He was not just breaking my heart.

He was trying to dismantle my life.

He wanted to take my money, my marriage, and my career and hand it all to her.

I opened my messaging app.

I found the thread with Diane Carver.

I typed a single message, my fingers flying across the glass screen.

We are not just divorcing him. We have to protect my career. She is in my building.

I hit send.

I pocketed the phone and looked up at the skyline.

The sun was shining, but the world looked darker than it ever had before.

I walked toward the parking garage, my heels striking the pavement like gunshots.

The time for sadness was over.

Now it was time for war.

Walking back into the glass-walled lobby of Northline Strategies felt like stepping into a pressurized airlock.

The world outside was messy, chaotic, and filled with the debris of my marriage.

But inside, the air was filtered, cool, and smelled of ambition.

I swiped my badge at the turnstile.

The little green light beeped.

A sound of permission.

Of belonging.

You belong here, I told myself.

This is your kingdom.

He is just a tourist.

I took the elevator to the 30th floor.

My face was a mask of perfectly applied foundation and neutral professionalism.

I nodded to the junior analysts huddled by the coffee machine.

They were talking about quarterly KPIs and a looming deadline for a logistics merger.

Their stress was quaint.

They were worried about spreadsheets.

I was worried about an espionage campaign being run from my own bedroom.

“Elena,” my assistant Sarah greeted me, standing up as I approached. “You have the city partners meeting in ten minutes. Conference Room B. And you look intense today.”

“It is a big day, Sarah,” I said, my voice steady. “Do we have the updated files uploaded and ready on the server?”

She nodded.

I walked into my office, placed my bag down, and checked my phone.

No messages from Diane.

No messages from Ronan.

Just the silence of the hunt.

I took a breath.

Smoothed my skirt.

And headed to Conference Room B.

The room was already full.

The city partners—three men in gray suits representing the municipal council—were seated on the left.

On the right sat the Northline team.

And at the head of the table, standing next to the projector screen, was a woman in a sharp cream blazer and a pencil skirt.

My step faltered for a fraction of a second.

Invisible to anyone who did not know me.

It was Marissa Vale.

Up close, without the dim lighting of the Hawthorne Room, she was even more striking.

She had the kind of polished, aggressive beauty that worked well in boardrooms.

She was arranging her notes with a confidence that made my skin crawl.

“Elena,” the lead councilman, Mr. Henderson, said, standing to shake my hand. “Good to see you. We were just getting started. I believe you haven’t met our new external compliance monitor.”

He gestured to her.

“This is Marissa Vale,” Henderson said. “She’s with Veil Orchard Consulting. The city has brought her in to audit the final phase of the project, just to ensure total transparency before we sign the $10 million grant.”

Marissa turned to me.

She extended a hand.

Her nails were painted a deep burgundy.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Lee,” she said.

Her voice was smooth, professional, and laced with arsenic.

She used my married name.

She did it on purpose.

Her eyes held no fear.

I saw amusement.

She knew exactly who I was.

She knew she was standing in my office auditing my work.

Paid for by the city.

Funded by my husband.

I took her hand.

It was cool.

Dry.

“Miss Vale,” I said. “I wasn’t aware we needed external compliance. Northline’s internal protocols are the gold standard.”

“Fresh eyes never hurt,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “Especially on a project of this magnitude. We just want to make sure there are no conflicts of interest.”

The audacity was breathtaking.

She was the conflict of interest.

I took my seat.

The meeting began.

For two hours, I had to sit there and listen to the woman sleeping with my husband critique my operational strategy.

She was smart.

I had to give her that.

She asked pointed questions about our vendor selection process and our data security measures.

She was looking for cracks.

She was looking for something she could use to leverage me out of my own deal.

My phone, placed face down on the table, buzzed once.

I glanced at it under the lip of the table.

Ethan:

I know you are angry. I will explain everything tonight. Just come home.

I flipped the phone back over.

I focused on Marissa.

She was pointing at a slide about liability.

“If there is a data breach,” she was saying, “the liability falls squarely on the Chief Operating Officer. We need to tighten the language here.”

She smiled at me.

It was a predator’s smile.

I am coming for your job, Elena, the smile said.

And your husband is holding the door open for me.

When the meeting ended, I walked straight back to my office and closed the door.

My hands were shaking.

I pressed them flat against the cold mahogany of my desk until the tremor stopped.

My computer pinged.

It was an encrypted email from Ronan.

Subject: update, 11:00 a.m.

Target Ethan tracked to a co-working space on Fourth Street rented by the hour. He met with subject B (Marissa) briefly before she left for your office. Afterward, Target met with an identified male approx 50 years old wearing a cheap suit. Target handed over a leather document bag. I have photos. Identity of the male is pending, but he looks like a fixer. Will update.

I stared at the screen.

Ethan was handing off documents to someone.

My desk phone rang.

It was Diane Carver.

“I have the report on the LLC,” Diane said, no preamble. “Veil Orchard Consulting was incorporated exactly ten months ago. The registered agent is a generic service, but the funding source traces back to a routing number that matches your husband’s consulting account, Elena. The timeline matches his business trips perfectly. Every time he went out of town, money moved into that account.”

“She is here, Diane,” I whispered. “Marissa is in my office. She is the city’s external auditor.”

“That is the play,” Diane said, her voice turning grim. “They are not just stealing money. They are setting up a fall guy. If anything goes wrong with this city project, who takes the blame?”

“I do,” I said. “I am the COO.”

“Exactly. And if the external auditor—who happens to be his girlfriend—finds irregularities in your work, they can fire you for cause. You lose your severance. You lose your stock options. And Ethan gets to divorce a disgrace instead of a powerhouse.”

A chill went down my spine that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

“I need to check the logs,” I said. “I have to go.”

I hung up and opened the internal network administration tool as COO.

I had high-level clearance.

I navigated to the access logs for the urban development initiative file server.

I scrolled through the history.

My access: 9 a.m.

Sarah’s access: 8:30 a.m.

Then I saw it.

User: admin_remote.

Time: 3:14 a.m.

IP address: external.

Someone had logged in remotely in the middle of the night.

They had accessed the confidential financial projections.

The sensitive data that, if leaked, would disqualify us from the city contract.

I checked the IP address.

It was a VPN bouncing through three different countries.

But the entry point was local.

They were planting something.

Or they were stealing data to leak it so they could blame me for the breach.

I did not call IT support.

That would create a ticket that Marissa could see.

Instead, I called the head of internal security.

A man named Marcus.

He owed me a favor from when I saved his department from budget cuts two years ago.

“Marcus,” I said when he answered, “this is off the record. I need you to secure the access logs for the urban project server from last night. Do not flag it. Just copy them to a secure drive and bring it to me physically.”

“Trouble?” Marcus asked.

“Potential sabotage,” I said. “I need to prove that the 3:14 login wasn’t me.”

“Consider it done,” he said.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of hypervigilance.

I worked.

I answered emails.

I reviewed proposals.

But every sense was tuned to the threat.

I was fighting a war on two fronts—the domestic and the professional—and the enemy lines had merged.

At 6:00, I packed my bag.

I had the secure drive from Marcus in my purse.

I walked down to the parking garage.

The garage was concrete and shadowed.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.

My heels echoed in the emptiness.

I reached my car and unlocked it.

“Elena.”

The voice came from behind a concrete pillar.

I spun around.

Phone already in my hand.

Ethan stepped out.

He looked terrible.

His tie was loose.

His hair messy.

His eyes red-rimmed.

He looked like a man who had not slept.

“Which is—How did you get in here?” I asked.

“My spouse badge,” he said. “You haven’t revoked it yet.”

“I will fix that tomorrow,” I said.

I held up my phone.

“I am recording this, Ethan. Anything you say will be sent to my lawyer.”

He took a step forward, his hands out in a pleading gesture.

“Baby, please put the phone down. You are overreacting. You are blowing this whole thing up and you don’t even understand what is happening.”

“I understand perfectly,” I said. “I met your business partner today. Marissa is very thorough.”

Ethan flinched.

“She is just doing her job. Listen to me, Elena. I am doing this for us. I know it looks bad. I know the money looks bad, but I am trying to secure a future where we don’t have to work eighty hours a week.”

“By stealing from me?” I asked. “By humiliating me?”