Chapter 4: The Velvet Warning
The rain had turned into a steady, gray drizzle by mid-morning, drumming a monotonous rhythm against the glass of my small apartment kitchen. I stood over the sink, rinsing out a mug, when the sharp, double chime of the lobby intercom broke the quiet.
I pressed the talk button without looking at the monitor. "Yes?"
"It's Victoria," a cool, modulated voice filtered through the tiny speaker. "Open the door. We need to talk before the press gets hold of the morning filings."
My hand froze on the faucet. Victoria—the blonde woman in the dark velvet dress from the dinner—was standing downstairs in the dreary corridor of my apartment building.
Two minutes later, the lock clicked, and she stepped into my cramped living room. She looked entirely out of place among my mismatched thrift-store furniture and towering stacks of reference books, her tailored wool coat immaculate, her blonde hair pulled back into a severe, elegant chignon. She didn't sit down; she simply stood by the small round table, surveying the room with a look of detached clinical curiosity.
"You're living well below your means for someone who apparently just married one of the wealthiest foundation directors in the city," Victoria said smoothly, turning her cool blue eyes toward me.
"I prefer it that way," I replied, crossing my arms over my gray sweater as I kept a safe distance near the kitchen counter. "What do you want, Victoria? If you're here to negotiate the audit results, you're wasting a trip."
She let out a short, humorless breath, stepping closer to the center of the room. "I'm not here for the audit. I'm here to tell you that Julian is using you. That leather folder you were so fascinated by last night? The seal on it isn't just wrong—it's a trap he engineered himself over a year ago to pin the subsidiary embezzlement on the previous executive board."
I felt the air go out of the room. I kept my face carefully blank, remembering the micro-expressions Julian had maintained across the candlelit table. "If Julian engineered the embezzlement, why would he expose it at a public dinner?"
"Because the scapegoat he originally chose for the fall backed out last week," Victoria said, her voice dropping lower, sharpening with genuine urgency. "He needed a new signature on the final asset transfer. Someone obscure. Someone with access, but no institutional power to fight back. Someone like you."
May you like
She pulled a folded envelope from her coat pocket and tossed it onto the coffee table between us.
"Check the timestamp on those bank transfers," she added, turning toward the door. "You'll find your own employee account received a routing deposit three days before the wedding filing. He didn't just marry you to protect you, my dear. He made you his accomplice."
