“It seems your secretary failed to scrub the servers,” Victor noted dryly.

Then the speakers cracked to life again. Not a live microphone. An audio file recovered from those servers — a recorded call between Dominic and Chloe from two days earlier.

His voice boomed through the ballroom, dripping with arrogant cruelty.

“Just alter the loan signatures, Chloe. Vivienne is too stupid to check the mail, let alone a ledger. She’ll take the fall. And once the ink is dry on my new contract, I can finally drop these Kensington losers.

God, Harrison is such a money-bag puppet, and his daughter is dumber than a box of rocks, but their equity is exactly the stepping stone I need before I dump them too.”

The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the rain lashing the floor-to-ceiling windows.