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CHAPTER 18: HE ATTACKS MY NAME
publish date:
2026-09-19 21:31:48
Latest chapter
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 21: NO MORE HIDING
"We stop being careful," I said. "Starting tonight."Four of us sat around Milo's conference table well past midnight, the office dark except for the lamp in the corner and the glow of a laptop screen still open to Naomi's recording. Milo, Naomi, Nathaniel, and me, the closest thing I had to allies in a fight that had taken almost everything from me before I understood I was even in it."Gideon knows someone close to him is working against him," Milo said. "Maybe not your name outright. But he knows there's a leak, and he's smart enough to start closing every door that might be feeding you information.""Which means our current approach is done," Nathaniel said. "Slow, quiet, one document at a time, that worked when he thought he had time to spare. He no longer believes that. If we keep moving at this pace, he'll shut down every source before we finish building the case.""So what do we do instead?" I asked.Nathaniel leaned forward, his eyes steady on mine. "We stop reacting to him a
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 20: HE KNOWS SOMETHING
The line went dead.I stared at my phone, the screen dark where Naomi's open call had been a second earlier, and every version of the worst outcome crowded into my head at once. Had he found the phone. Had he found her. Had that soft, deliberate sound been the last thing I'd ever hear from her.I called back three times. Straight to voicemail, all three.I sat frozen in my kitchen for what seemed like an hour, though the clock told me it had been twenty minutes at most, my phone gripped so hard my knuckles ached.Then it rang."Naomi.""I'm fine." Her voice came out steady, steadier than I expected given what I'd heard through a dead line. "He didn't take the phone from me. He was reaching for his own, on the table between us. I walked out of that room certain my heart had stopped, for nothing."I closed my eyes, relief crashing through me hard enough to leave me lightheaded."Tell me what happened. Everything.""I told him I was terrified," she said. "Not acting terrified, Elise. I l
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 19: THE WOMAN HE PLANNED TO SACRIFICE
My phone rang before I'd even set it down from our last call."Elise, I opened it."Naomi's voice shook, thin and fast, nothing like the composed woman who'd handed me a flash drive on my porch weeks ago."What's inside?""Financial documents. Transfer authorizations. My signature on every single page, dated across the last two years, tied to accounts I've never seen before tonight." A breath, ragged, close to breaking. "He built an entire paper trail with my name on it, Elise. If your investigation reaches these transactions, I'm the one who goes to prison. Not him.""You're sure it's your signature?""It's close enough to pass. The way Gideon's forgery of yours passed, until you looked hard enough to see the difference. I know my own handwriting, Elise. This isn't a mistake. This is a plan."I gripped the phone tighter, my mind already racing ahead to what came next."What did you do?""I went back to him. Told him I was scared, that I'd seen the folder and didn't understand what he
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 18: HE ATTACKS MY NAME
"Have you seen this?"Milo's voice came through the phone before I'd even said hello, an urgency in it that put me on edge before I understood why."Seen what?""Check your email. I forwarded you a link this minute."I pulled the article up on my phone while Milo waited on the line, and felt my stomach drop with every paragraph. A business gossip site, the kind that thrived on scandal dressed up as concern, ran a piece under the headline *Company Heiress Struggling Under Pressure, Husband Steps In.* The article quoted an unnamed source close to the family describing me as more erratic by the week, prone to disappearing for days, isolating myself from people who cared about me."He's not confronting me at all," I said, my voice hollow. "He's going around me.""He learned his lesson in the boardroom," Milo said. "He can't win an argument with you in a room full of people who can check the evidence. So he's moving the fight somewhere the evidence doesn't matter as much. Public perception
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 17: THE AUDIT THEY DIDN'T EXPECT
"I believe this audit deliberately left something out."Nathaniel let the words sit in the room for a moment before he opened the folder wider and turned it so the whole table could see."These are transfer records from the three divisions Gideon claims suffered losses," he said. "Look at the dates next to each withdrawal. Every one of them happened within days of a corresponding deposit into a company called Ridgeline Capital Partners."He slid a second page across the table."Ridgeline is a holding company. Its registered agent shares an address with two other entities already connected to this investigation, both linked to a man named Harold Whitfield, once head of this company's operations division."A murmur moved through the room, low and uneasy."The money didn't disappear because of interference," Nathaniel continued. "It was moved out on purpose, timed to coincide with decisions Elise questioned, so the losses would land on her name instead of the people who caused them."Fos
Once Bitten, Twice Shy CHAPTER 16: THE BOARDROOM TRAP
I walked into that boardroom braced for Gideon to attack me in front of everyone, to stand up and call me unstable, erratic, unfit to hold my father's shares.He didn't do any of that.Instead, he stood at the head of the table with a calm, professional smile and clicked through a slide presentation like a man delivering routine earnings, not preparing to destroy his wife in front of her father's oldest colleagues."Thank you all for coming on short notice," Gideon said, his voice smooth, measured, the voice of a man who believed he'd already won before the meeting started. "I wish this were a routine update. It isn't. We've identified serious losses across three divisions over the last two quarters, and I think it's important the board understands how this happened."He advanced to a slide showing red numbers stacked against black ones, losses that looked severe enough to draw sharp intakes of breath from several board members around the table."These losses trace back to a pattern o
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