He’d tried to force the main door, only to find the concierge had “flagged the suite for a plumbing emergency” and sealed the floor.

“They can’t do this,” Preston hissed on the recording.

“Do you know who my mother is?” “The credit cards are all declined,” Beatrice snapped back, her aristocratic composure fraying by the minute. “Every one of them.

My accounts, the estate accounts—frozen. It says fraud investigation. Who freezes an account overnight?” I did. Or rather, my forensic team had.

The moment we mapped their finances, we found the rot: Beatrice’s crumbling estate was mortgaged three times over, and both she and Preston were buried under six million dollars of debt to a network of private lenders they’d been dodging for a year.

That was the real reason for the forty slaps. They weren’t aristocrats. They were desperate, cornered people who had decided my daughter’s life was cheaper than their own ruin.

“The Halloran loan group holds most of their paper,” Dominic said, his voice a lethal purr, tapping the encrypted satellite phone once.