He gave a single, decisive nod. “That is exactly the plan.”
David reached into his jacket, retrieved a pen, and scribbled something on the back of his business card before sliding it across the scarred Formica table. I picked it up. His handwriting was sharp and aggressively slanted: “Morrison Estate. 2 p.m. Friday.”
“I need sixteen hours,” he stated flatly. “Meet me tomorrow at your house. Bring your lawyer.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked, my fingers tightening around the edge of the card.
“Three things. Each one worse than the last.”
“Tell me.”
“Not yet,” he said, his expression hardening into something resembling genuine pity. “But if my instincts are right, Derek Pierce is absolutely not the kind of man your daughter should be marrying.”
A physical chill spider-walked down my spine, settling deep in the marrow of my bones. “Can you stop this?”
“Depends entirely on what I drag into the light, and what you are willing to do with it.”
“Anything,” I promised.
He studied my face for a long, heavy moment. Then he stood up, dropped a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto the table, and buttoned his jacket. “Go home, Catherine. Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a very long day.”
I didn’t sleep a wink. I drove home in a detached, suffocating daze, the tires humming a monotonous rhythm against the asphalt. The estate was pitch black when I pulled into the driveway. I climbed the sweeping staircase, walked into my bedroom, and collapsed onto the mattress. I didn’t bother undressing. I just lay there on top of the heavy duvet, staring blankly up at the shadowed ceiling while the grandfather clock in the hall ticked away the hours.
“Three things. Each one worse than the last.” What kind of monster had my daughter brought into our home? The night crawled by with agonizing slowness. Midnight. One in the morning. Two. At some indeterminate point, pure exhaustion dragged my eyelids shut.
When my phone violently buzzed against the nightstand, the sky outside my window was bleeding the pale, bruised purple of early dawn. I grabbed the device. 5:47 a.m. It was a text message from David’s unknown number.
“Found the shell company. Cascade Holdings LLC. Offshore accounts. This is infinitely bigger than you think.”
I shot up in bed, my heart hammering violently against my ribs. “Cascade Holdings.” It was the exact name Derek had casually tossed out through the thin drywall of the boutique. David had unearthed their financial graveyard in less than nine hours. I sat there in the quiet dawn, staring at the glowing screen. “Bigger than I thought.” How could it possibly get any worse?
David Reyes arrived at the Morrison Estate at two o’clock sharp, gripping a battered leather briefcase. Sarah Goldman was already pacing the length of my study. George Matthews sat heavily in the leather armchair beside her. George was sixty-five, gray-haired, Thomas’s old college roommate, and our fiercely loyal Senior Vice President for two decades.
David didn’t waste time on pleasantries. He set the heavy briefcase squarely on my mahogany desk, snapped the brass latches open, and withdrew three thick folders: red, blue, and black.
“Start with the red one,” he instructed.
I reached out with trembling hands and flipped the red cover open. Inside was a grainy surveillance-style photograph. It showed Derek Pierce shaking hands with a massive, imposing man in a sharp dark suit. The timestamp placed them on a busy Manhattan street corner on April 24th.
“Dmitri Volkov,” David announced, his voice devoid of emotion. “He is an enforcer for Viktor Kozlov. Russian organized crime, operating heavily out of New York and New Jersey.”
I looked up, the air suddenly completely sucked from the room. “What does Derek owe him?”
“Two point five million dollars.”
The silence that followed was utterly deafening. George let out a ragged breath.
“Derek has been gambling recklessly since 2020,” David continued. “Illegal, high-stakes poker games. Underground sports betting. He is in dangerously deep.”
David reached into the folder and pulled out a bank statement. “March 15th, 2024. A wire transfer. Three hundred thousand dollars moved directly from Derek’s personal account to an offshore entity in the Cayman Islands. That was a localized payment. Not nearly enough to clear the principal debt, just enough blood money to buy him a little more time.”
He laid out two more glossy photographs on the desk. Derek and Dmitri again, caught in different locations. May 8th. June 3rd. Then, he presented a printed screenshot of a text message. It was from Dmitri’s number.
“June 30 deadline. No extensions.”
“If Derek doesn’t pay that balance by June 30th,” David said with chilling quietness, “he will not live to see July.”
I stared down at the photographs, my stomach violently rolling. My future son-in-law, the man who kissed my daughter’s cheek and drank my wine, shaking hands with a man who would gladly put a bullet in his head.
“So, he is stealing my entire company,” I whispered, the horrifying math clicking into place, “just to pay off the mob.”
David gave a grim nod and reached for the next file. “Folder two. Blue.”
He flipped it open. “Cascade Holdings LLC. Officially formed on March 10th, 2024. It’s a Delaware registration.” He paused, letting his eyes meet mine. “There are exactly two listed partners. Derek Pierce and Rachel Morrison.”
The floor seemed to tilt violently beneath my feet.
He pulled out a printed email, a specific paragraph highlighted in glaring yellow ink. It was sent from Derek Pierce to Martin Blackwell, the CEO of Stratton Advisory—our fiercest corporate competitor.
“Subject: Morrison Client List plus Q1 financials,” David read aloud. “Date: April 14th, 2024. Files attached. Remaining data available upon acquisition confirmation. Wire $500,000 to Cascade Holdings account per our agreement.”
I literally forgot how to breathe. The room started to spin.
“Derek sold your proprietary client list,” David explained, his voice anchoring me to the present. “He packaged your intimate financials and handed them to your biggest competitor for half a million dollars.”
George leaned forward, his weathered face darkening into a furious scowl. “I knew something was fundamentally wrong with our quarters. I just couldn’t mathematically prove it.”
David wasn’t finished. He laid out three more damning dossiers. “TechCorp Solutions. Derek leaked your highly confidential strategy straight to their competitor. Because of that, you lost a two-million-dollar annual contract. Midwest Manufacturing. Derek deliberately sabotaged the timeline and missed critical deadlines. That cost you one point five million in guaranteed revenue. Harbor Investments. Derek intentionally gave them disastrous financial advice, causing a five-million-dollar loss. They sued your firm. You had to settle out of court for one point two million.”
He looked directly at me, letting the absolute carnage sink in. “Total structural damage to your firm: six point five million dollars in lost revenue. Derek wasn’t just skimming from the top, Catherine. He was methodically destroying your company from the inside out, dropping its valuation so it would be infinitely easier to sell off in pieces.”
I felt as though I had been physically beaten. My ribs ached. “He poisoned my company,” I rasped.
“Folder three,” David announced, his hand resting on the sleek black cover. “Dr. James Caldwell.”
David’s eyes narrowed into dark slits. “He has done this exact thing before. Three separate times.”
He meticulously spread out three typed case summaries across the polished wood.