Chapter 3 - The Interrogation Room and the UltimatumThe interrogation room at the federal field office smelled of stale coffee, industrial cleaner, and fear.
Across the metal table sat Agent Thomas Vance—no relation to Richard, a detail the agent had made painfully clear within the first five minutes. He tossed a thick manila folder onto the table with a heavy thud.
“You gave us a masterpiece, Mrs. Vance,” Agent Thomas said, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Every routing number, every phantom employee, every illicit shell company from Zurich to the Cayman Islands. It’s enough to put Richard and Brandon away for thirty years. But there’s a problem.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What problem?”
Agent Thomas slid a single sheet of paper across the table. It was a corporate restructuring document dated six months ago.
“Two weeks before you filed your report, someone executed a massive, emergency asset transfer from Meridian Capital’s primary philanthropic trust directly into a master holding account controlled by Richard Vance.”
My breath caught in my throat. I grabbed the paper, my eyes scanning the signatures at the bottom.
Authorized by: E. Sterling.
My maiden name.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “I never signed that. I haven't touched Meridian’s trust accounts in two years!”
“According to the digital timestamp, it was accessed using your secure cryptographic private key,” Agent Thomas replied quietly, his eyes narrowing. “The same key that was stored in your personal home safe. The safe that only you and Brandon knew the combination to.”
The room seemed to spin.
Richard’s smile in the hallway flashed back into my mind. He hadn't been calm because he was defeated. He had been calm because he used my own corporate identity to frame me as the mastermind behind his entire embezzlement scheme.
To the federal investigators reading this document, it didn't look like an abused wife exposing her corrupt in-laws.
It looked like the billionaire heiress of Meridian Capital had used her family’s front to orchestrate a massive financial heist, using her husband and father-in-law as unwitting pawns—and now, she was trying to pin the blame on them to save her own skin.
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“They set me up,” I breathed, the blood draining entirely from my face.
“Maybe,” Agent Thomas said, sliding a pair of silver handcuffs across the metal table toward me. “Or maybe you flew too close to the sun, Mrs. Vance. Right now, I have an active warrant for your arrest as an accessory to grand-scale corporate fraud.”
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