Chapter 22
Elena thought about the women coming forward. About the employees Marcus had destroyed. About twelve years of being invisible.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me at all.”
She went to bed. At two in the morning, she heard Dominic’s phone ring through the wall, heard his voice go cold and clipped.
When he appeared in the doorway minutes later, his expression was granite.
“Get dressed. We need to leave now.”
“What happened?”
“Marcus just had your father arrested.”
The words didn’t make sense.
“What?”
“Fraud. Embezzlement. Tax evasion. Every financial crime you can think of.” Dominic was already moving, grabbing his jacket. “It’s a message. He’s showing you what happens when you fight back.”
Elena’s hands went numb.
“But my father — he doesn’t have anything to do with this. He took Marcus’s money.”
“That makes him vulnerable.” Dominic’s voice was hard. “Get dressed. We’re going to the station.”
The drive took twelve minutes. Elena spent every second trying to breathe, trying not to fall apart, because her father was a lot of things — weak, selfish, disappointing — but he was not a criminal. Marcus had set him up. He had to have.
Rebecca met them at the station, already in full lawyer mode.
“They’re holding him on two million dollars bail. The charges are extensive. If even half of them stick, he’s looking at fifteen years.”
“Marcus did this.” Elena’s voice shook. “He’s punishing me through my father.”
“We can’t prove that.” Rebecca’s jaw was tight. “Not yet. But we will.”
They wouldn’t let Elena see him. She stood in the waiting area with her back against the wall, watching the fluorescent lights buzz, and she felt something inside her go very quiet and very cold.
All her life she had been the one who absorbed it. The one who kept her face still. The one who counted to forty.
She was done absorbing.
“Rebecca,” she said. “The business records. The zoning, the permits, the bribes. How long until we can use them?”
Rebecca looked at her for a long moment, and then she smiled — a small, dangerous smile.
“Sooner than you think.”
CHAPTER 8
It took eleven days.
Eleven days of discovery motions and subpoenas and Rebecca working past midnight in that glass office. Eleven days of Elena sleeping four hours a night and learning, for the first time, the actual shape of her husband’s life — the shell companies, the offshore accounts, the zoning variance on the Riverside parcel that had gone through in six days when the average was nine months.