Bram was teaching her, slowly, that it didn’t have to — that there was such a thing as power that protected rather than consumed, and that the difference between the two was simply what a person decided to do on the days when no one was watching and cruelty would have been more profitable than mercy.

Chapter 15 — The Email

Over the next six weeks, the forensic team pulled the whole rotten architecture into the light: personal luxury trips billed as client visits, corporate vehicles registered to no one but Ingrid, unauthorized executive bonuses funneled straight into Nico’s string of failed side ventures.

Each finding was worse than the last, and each was documented in the tidy, undeniable way that fraud always is when the people committing it have never once feared being read.

And then they found the email thread between Leopold and Nico.

In one message, sent two weeks before Finn was born, Nico had written: With the baby born and no husband in the picture, she’ll break easily.