The Decoy Contract

POV: Malia

Two days later, the paranoia had settled into my bones like a permanent ache. I hadn't slept for more than three hours a night, spending the dark hours dissecting Elena’s ledgers. But the deeper I dug into the financial routing numbers tied to the corrupt officials, the more I noticed a pattern in the offshore transfers. A secondary routing sequence kept appearing in the margins, written in a different ink.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my closet at two in the morning, the laptop screen dimmed to its lowest setting. I ran the secondary routing numbers through a dark-web financial scraper I’d paid a ridiculous sum to access. I expected the search to spit back the name of a shell corporation owned by Jarrah’s rivals, or perhaps a slush fund for the police commissioner.

The progress bar hit one hundred percent. The screen refreshed.

The name on the offshore account stared back at me in stark white text: Malia Vance.

My maiden name. The name I hadn’t legally used since the day I signed Jarrah’s marriage contract.

I dragged my thumbnail across my lower lip until it stung. I clicked into the account details. It wasn’t a small slush fund. It was an accumulation of massive, untraceable wire transfers spanning the last fourteen months. Millions. Sitting entirely in my name, with no co-signers, no corporate oversight, and no ties to Jarrah’s primary holding companies.

My mind scrambled to piece together the logic. Jarrah was meticulous. He didn’t bleed money into dead-end accounts unless there was a strategic purpose. Setting up a shadow account in my maiden name was a liability to him. Unless it wasn't a liability. Unless it was a trap. If the federal authorities ever broke through his firewall, they would follow the money straight to Malia Vance. I would be the fall guy. He was insulating himself, building a golden parachute woven entirely out of my legal ruin.

I slammed the laptop shut, the metallic click echoing in the confined space of the closet. Anger, hot and blinding, flared in the back of my throat. I had played the dutiful, silent partner. I had ignored the violence of his business, the blood on his hands, because he had promised me security. And all this time, he had been building my gallows.

I stood up, pushing past the rows of designer dresses I never wore, and walked out into the bedroom. The bed was empty. Jarrah was downstairs in his office, as he always was at this hour. I needed to see his face. I needed to look into his eyes and figure out exactly when he decided I was expendable.

The stairs were cold under my bare feet. I bypassed the kitchen and walked straight to the heavy mahogany doors of his study. They were slightly ajar. I pushed them open without knocking.

Jarrah was sitting behind his desk, reviewing a stack of physical documents. He didn't flinch when the doors swung open; he just calmly placed his pen down and looked up. The desk lamp cast harsh shadows across the sharp planes of his face, making him look older, infinitely more tired.

"You're awake," he said quietly. It wasn't a question.

"I couldn't sleep." I walked into the room, stopping a few feet from his desk. I kept my hands folded across my chest to hide the slight tremor in my fingers. "What are you working on?"

He looked at the papers, then back at me. He didn't attempt to cover them. "Restructuring."

"Restructuring what?" I pressed, my voice deceptively calm. "Our assets? Or our liabilities?"

Jarrah tilted his head, a microscopic shift in his posture indicating he had caught the edge in my tone. He stood up, slowly buttoning his suit jacket. He walked around the desk until he was standing directly in front of me. The sheer size of him always felt like a gravitational pull, forcing everything in the room to orbit his presence.

"You're angry," he stated softly.

"I'm curious." I held his gaze, refusing to step back. "You always tell me to look at the bottom line, Jarrah. I'm just trying to understand where I fit into your ledger."

He stared down at me, his dark eyes unreadable. For a brief, terrifying second, I thought he was going to touch me. Instead, he slipped his hands into his pockets. "You fit exactly where I placed you, Malia. Safe."

"Safe is a relative term."

"Not to me." Jarrah's voice dropped a fraction, the timbre vibrating in the quiet room. "Go back to sleep. You'll need your energy for tomorrow."

He turned his back to me, dismissing me entirely. I walked out of the study, the anger morphing into a cold, hard clarity. He thought he was protecting his assets by setting me up. He didn't know I had Elena's ledgers. He didn't know I had the laptop. And he didn't know that if he planned on throwing me to the wolves, I was going to burn his entire empire to the ground first.