Chapter 6
Sunday morning broke with a heavy fog rolling off the ocean, obscuring the horizon and blanketing the beach house in an ethereal gray twilight. Mary sat at the rustic wooden dining table, reviewing encrypted financial spreadsheets on her laptop while sipping herbal tea. The preliminary forensic audit reports were coming in from her independent investigators, and the scale of Ethan’s financial misconduct was far worse than she had initially calculated.
He hadn't just been siphoning operational funds; he had been using company assets as collateral for high-risk speculative trades in overseas cryptocurrency markets through shadow companies registered under Chloe’s name. It was a textbook embezzlement scheme, executed with breathtaking arrogance.
A sharp rapping on the front door shattered the silence of the morning.
Mary didn't flinch. She closed her laptop lid, stood up, and walked slowly toward the entryway. She didn't need to look through the peephole to know who was standing on the other side. The heavy pounding came again, faster and more frantic this time.
She unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open. Jax stood on the porch, looking disheveled, wearing the same wrinkled black pants from the hotel room, though he had swapped his white dress shirt for a heavy wool coat. His dark hair was windblown, and his eyes were bloodshot.
"Mary. Thank God," Jax muttered, taking an immediate step forward as if to push past her into the house.
Mary extended her right arm, planting her palm firmly against his chest, stopping him dead in his tracks. Her face was an impassive mask of cold marble. "You are trespassing, Jax. Turn around and get off my property before I call the local sheriff."
Jax blinked, staring at her in disbelief as though he couldn't reconcile the poised, formidable woman before him with the shocked bride he had seen in the hotel doorway less than forty-eight hours ago. "Mary, please. You have to listen to me. Ethan set this up. He engineered the whole thing to trap me, to make me look like the bad guy so you'd focus your anger on me while he cleared out the accounts."
Mary’s eyes narrowed slightly, though her voice remained steady and quiet. "Do you take me for a fool, Jax? My forensic team has been downloading server logs for twenty-four hours. Your digital signature is all over the offshore wire transfers. You were his primary proxy in the acquisitions department."
"I was blackmailed!" Jax shouted, his voice cracking with genuine panic as the cold wind whipped around them. "Ethan found out about my gambling debts from three years ago. He bought my promissory notes from the syndicate. He told me if I didn't help him orchestrate the asset transfer and keep Chloe quiet, they would break my legs and ruin my family."
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Mary studied his face, searching for any flicker of deceit, but found only the hollow desperation of a cornered animal. It didn't excuse his actions, but it added a darker, more calculating dimension to Ethan’s betrayal.
"Then you should have come to me," Mary said softly. "Instead of playing his game."
