Arthur Vance had not simply built a real estate empire.

He had built a house of cards, and it was moments from falling, and he was using everyone around him as the mortar to hold it up a little longer.

Over the previous four years, he had siphoned, over four years, nearly forty-five million dollars out of the company to cover catastrophic private losses in offshore trading.

And to keep that two-hundred-million-dollar bank loan alive — the loan that was the only thing keeping the whole structure standing — he had forged asset valuations, fabricated commercial leases for tenants who did not exist, and, worst of all, used Patricia’s personal inheritance accounts as collateral.

Without her knowledge.