Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Divorce That Made Me A Billionaire : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

VICTORIAHer name was Lena.That was the first thing she said when she sat down across from me at a small coffee shop in Brooklyn. Not hello. Not sorry. Just her name, like she needed me to know she was a real person before anything else.I had picked the location myself. Far from Manhattan, far from anyone who might recognize my face or hers. The kind of place where nobody looked up from their phones. It had old wooden tables, bad lighting, and coffee that smelled better than it tasted.Lena came in looking nothing like me. She was in an oversized hoodie and a baseball cap pulled so low I almost didn't spot her when she walked in. Without the clothes, without the hair, and the posture they had drilled into her, she was just a young woman who looked scared. Softer than the previous version. Younger and tired too, the kind of tiredness that didn’t come from one bad night but from a long stretch of them.She sat down and wrapped both hands around a coffee cup she never once lifted to he

CLARKI had kept one name out of everything.Not because I was protecting him. I wanted to be clear about that. I kept it back because I needed to be certain before I said it out loud. In my world, dropping a name at the wrong moment was the same as pulling a pin and walking away. You had to know exactly what you were setting off before you did it.His name was Harlan Voss.He was sixty-one years old, rarely photographed, and the kind of man whose power was measured in how visible he was. The less you saw of him, the more he had. He ran everything through a network of smaller legal and financial firms that looked independent on paper and weren't. You couldn't find him in a directory or a board listing. You found him by following the money through a lot of layers and most people gave up before they ever got there.Many years ago, he came to me with a job.He wanted me to design a legal program for managing what he called identity assets in high-value disputes. His exact words were car

VICTORIADaniel Rhodes was sixty-four and lean, but he still had a kind of stillness about him that reminded me of old photographs that were taken before the subject even knew someone was watching. He was already seated when I walked in, and he didn't look like a man who had been hunting me. He looked like a man who had been running for a very long time and had finally decided to sit down.I sat across from him and left the door open behind me."You came alone," he said."Not entirely," I replied.He smiled, just slightly. "The team in the lobby.""And the one on this floor," I added.He nodded once. Then he placed a small black drive on the table between us. Nothing about it was impressive. It was the kind of thing you could buy at any store for a few dollars."Everything Trent commissioned," he said. "His instructions, his communications, the money transfers to Voss's firm. The full documentation for the duplicate program, with Trent's own signature on the authorization."I looked

VICTORIA"I didn't leak her name," he said. No greeting, no lead-up, no warmup. Just that, straight out, like he had been holding it in for a long while and just had to say it.I didn't respond immediately. I let the silence stretch and do its work."Victoria," he said."I heard you," I replied.There was another short pause. "I need you to believe me.""You need a lot of things from me, Trent. That doesn't mean you get them."He let out a slow breath. I could hear movement on his end; the soft sound of a door closing, like he had stepped somewhere private to make this call. That small detail stayed with me."I know how it looks," he said. "The timing is as bad as it gets. The hearing gets pushed up, Lena's name goes out the same night, and I'm the first person everyone points at. I get it. But it wasn't me. And whoever did it wasn't acting on anything I said."I leaned back in my chair. "You've been working against me for months," I said. "You hired people to go through my past. You

VICTORIAI didn't go straight to Serena after what Trent told me. That would have been the wrong move. I had learned a long time ago that the worst thing you could do when you suspected someone was to tip them off before you had proof. So I went back to my office, closed the door, and called Elio."I need a full audit on Serena's team," I said. "Not just Serena. Everyone who had access to the case files. Communications, transfers, the whole thing.""How discreet are we talking?" he asked."Completely," I said. "Nobody should hear about this.""I'll need to call in a favor," he said."Call it in," I told him.He called me back eighteen hours later.I was still at my desk when my phone rang, still going through documents I'd already read three times because I needed something to do with my hands. I picked up on the first ring."Serena's clean," Elio said.I let out a breath. "But?""But one of her junior associates isn't," he said. "A girl named Priya. Twenty-six. She's been on the team