I looked him in the eye and returned the smile with a cold he didn’t catch. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” I told him. “Tonight I finally figured out everything I need to know about you.”

At 12:23 a.m., Karen sent a secure link to my phone. I uploaded every file while Sophia sat beside me, gripping my hand for something to hold on to.

Everything went straight to a lead prosecutor, a veteran cybercrime analyst, and the judge on emergency warrant duty. The first recording started playing in the quiet of the room, and Mason’s voice came through smooth and amused.

“Cry all you want, Sophia,” it began. “Your mother believes me, not you. Half the cops in this town play golf at my club.

Who do you honestly think they’ll side with?”

The second one was worse. “If you marry that fool and tell him a single thing, I’ll move every dollar before sunrise. You’ll be left with nothing, and your mother will blame you for losing the family house.”

That threat was what made this urgent. The analyst started tracing recent transfers out of Mason’s business accounts and into a tangle of shell companies run by his personal driver and his assistant.

He’d even pulled money out of a private trust Sophia’s late grandmother had set up for her. “He stole from me?” Sophia asked, her voice unsteady.

“Not only from you,” I said, scrolling the logs. “He used your name to sign off on these fake transfers.”

Her grief settled into something firmer. “Then take all of it to the police,” she said.

At 1:10 a.m., there was a knock at the suite door. Sophia flinched, but I said softly, “You decide whether he comes in or not.”

She pulled her robe straight and looked at the door with a new steadiness. “Let him in,” she said.

Mason walked in without waiting for an answer. His eyes went straight to the open laptop on the desk. “You two still up?”

“Just talking,” Sophia said.

“About what?” Mason asked, glancing between us.