Eric sat propped against the pillows, hands trembling as he reached out. He took the baby as if she were made of glass. Her gummy smile, the soft, aimless coos—it snapped something awake in him.
His face softened, turning tender despite himself. Tears tracked down his cheeks and bled into the swaddle in dark blooms.
A few minutes passed in a fragile silence. Just him and the baby.
Then Ms. Jones reappeared in the doorway. "Dr. Smith is here."
When Nicole moved to take the infants back, Eric's arms tightened on instinct. His eyes flashed with pure, helpless refusal. He didn't want to let go—couldn't afford to—but he had to.
Eleanor placed a firm hand on his shoulder. "Easy. Slow. They're not going anywhere. They're staying with you."
Dr. Smith hurried into the master suite, his gaze snagging at once on the blood-stained sheets, the discarded cuffs, the wreck of the person in the bed. For a beat, his professional mask slipped—then he forced it back into place.
Eleanor met him halfway. "I have matters to attend to at the office. Dr. Smith—she's in your hands now."
She stepped into the hall, her mind already pivoting to the company. Then she stopped.
She still needed Linda aligned. She couldn't afford to let her roam.
Eleanor turned toward Linda's suite, ready to play the dutiful son. But before her knuckles grazed the heavy oak door, Linda's voice came through the wood—sharp, cold, and entirely too clear.
"…She's driving me out of my mind. That monthly trust payment is a joke—scraps. When does the rest vest? When do I get the real payout?"
Every word was pulled tight by hunger. "You act like it's so simple. 'Wait for the right opening.' The babies are newborns—what exactly do you expect me to do?"
A muffled response from the other end of the line. Then Linda spoke again, her voice slick with a sick satisfaction.
"Look at her now—unraveling. Messy. Barely even human. The doctor's calling it postpartum depression. Who knows if she's faking."
A sharp exhale. "And those meds? Not a chance. I'm not letting her lie there in comfort. Not after all those years of that Ivy League posture and that polite little smile, looking at us like we were trash. Even your father used to say she was 'more refined' than me—that she had better taste."
Her voice brightened into something cruel. "Watching her fall apart? It's the only thing that makes the noise in my head finally go quiet."
A pause—whoever she was talking to was trying to rein her in.
Linda snorted. "Don't worry about me. I'm here for a reason, and I'm not being bought off with crumbs. If I don't get what I'm owed, I'm not going anywhere."
Then her tone flipped—suddenly eager, almost giddy.
"…Yeah. You're right."
You could hear the smile before the words landed.
"If she has an 'accident,' guardianship defaults to Eric. Clean. And then everything she owns—every last cent—officially takes the Davis name."
Her laugh was thin and sharp, like a razor.
Eleanor stood in the hallway, frozen, listening without moving a muscle. Her face stayed blank.
So Linda had never intended to leave. The earlier tantrum had been theater. But right now, the one being ground into the dirt wasn't Eleanor. It was Eric.
What Eleanor hadn't anticipated was how far Linda was willing to go—how easily she could talk herself into murder.
This wasn't just about breaking him. This wasn't just about withholding medication to speed the spiral.
Linda was pushing him toward the edge. Maybe over it.
For Linda, suffering wasn't collateral damage. It was the point.
If Linda wasn't going to back off, Eleanor wasn't going to waste another second trying to reason with her.
—
Aethel Corp Headquarters—CEO's Office
For the past two months, Eleanor had been fighting a war on two fronts: keeping the company afloat and dismantling it from the inside. Sarah Hoffman's legal team, backed by forensic accountants and Daniel Green's investigators, had been wading through a swamp of double books and the data dump from Eric's phone—hour by hour, day by day.
After Eleanor's push, Jake Parker had delivered the hidden paper ledgers into her hands. Originals. Heavy. Ugly. More than enough to build a case.
But the scale of the fraud was staggering: a labyrinth of shell companies, braided wire transfers, legal tripwires. Too much for any one mind to hold at once. Eleanor flagged what she could as she found it. Her team dug in.
Now the wait was over.
Her private laptop chimed with an encrypted notification.
From: Sarah Hoffman
Eleanor's pulse kicked—harder than she wanted to admit. She opened it.
A password-protected cloud link. Inside: two months of cross-referencing, fund tracing, and digital forensics—every red flag they could verify using the double books and the recovered data from Eric's phone. Not a hunch. Not a theory. A roadmap of what they could prove, and how.
Highlights, annotations, indexes blurred past as she scrolled. Aethel Corp—the company she and Eric had built with her capital, her time, her connections—looked less like a business now and more like a hollow shell wrapped around rot.
She went straight to tax fraud.
In two years, Eric had dodged more than seventy million dollars through inflated overhead, fabricated contracts, and a web of shell entities.
The number hit like a punch. Her breath caught.
Next: supplier and contractor kickbacks.
The "actual" expenses from the secret ledgers sat side-by-side with the official filings. The discrepancies were obscene: major bids awarded without a single competitive quote; contracts dated months before the suppliers even existed; paperwork reverse-engineered to fit specific shell companies after the money had already moved.
It was the old procurement scandal all over again—only quieter, cleaner, better hidden.
The evidence pointed to one man:
Kevin Davis. Procurement Manager. Eric's younger brother.
Kickbacks. Material substitutions. Substandard goods sliding into the supply chain where compliant ones should have been. If Kevin was pulling strings on the ground, then Eric wasn't some clueless CEO being "taken advantage of" by family.
He was the architect.
The bank records made that unmistakable.
A tide of "consulting fees" and "service payments" flowed into tax havens—entities with directors who were nothing but paper. The auditors didn't stop at the surface. Through beneficial-ownership tracing and international bank requests, they'd drawn a direct line from those offshore entities to overseas trusts tied to the Davis family.
Eric wasn't just aware.
He was steering.
And Jake Parker wasn't clean, either.
His approval signatures. The timing of his sign-offs. The deposits into his personal accounts. It all lined up too neatly alongside the dirtiest transfers.
Then a secondary report caught her eye—an anomaly analysis on large cash movements—and Eleanor's stomach dropped.
She'd underestimated Sophia.
Portions of major project payments never touched the company's normal operating accounts. They were split into micro-transfers and routed through dozens of overseas accounts in layered hops—a textbook laundering pattern. Some of the funds were eventually traced to discreet lobbying groups and offshore entities with deep ties to power brokers on Capitol Hill.
This wasn't just corporate greed.
This was dark money buying influence.
At key choke points, the same internal tag appeared again and again: SSA.
In the official system, it stood for Strategic Sub-Account. But the forensic report flagged it as a bypass—used to slip past compliance filters like they weren't there. A digital skeleton key.
Then the decrypted chats from Eric's phone closed the loop.
SSA didn't mean Strategic Sub-Account.
It meant Sophia Special Approval.
Sophia wasn't just a mistress. She was a shadow CFO—issuing instructions, overriding compliance locks, personally greenlighting the most toxic transactions.
Eleanor heard Sophia's voice in her head, sweet and casual: If the terms are right, the approvals come through fast.
So that was what "the right terms" meant.
This wasn't private humiliation. This wasn't a tawdry affair.
This was a federal crime.
Eleanor's fingers trembled against the trackpad—not from fear. From focus.
These weren't suspicions anymore.
They were court-admissible facts.
For the first time since the swap, she had something sharp enough to cut Eric down.