Chapter 4 - The Midnight Audit
By midnight, the grand estate was deathly quiet.
The guests had long since been permitted to leave, slipping out through the iron gates with shaken nerves and hushed whispers that would dominate the Boston gossip columns for months. The police had come and gone—not to arrest us, but to escort Marcus Vance out the front door in handcuffs after Silas handed them four gigabytes of corporate extortion logs.
I sat at the massive oak desk in the study—the very desk where Grant had plotted my isolation, believing he was the undisputed king of the castle.
The computer terminal glowed in the dark room, displaying the master financial ledger of Ashford Industries. For seven years, I had been locked out of these accounts, treated as a financial illiterate who couldn't balance a checkbook. But my brothers hadn't spent their lives building multi-billion-dollar conglomerates by accident. Nathan had spent the last three hours cracking Grant’s master encryption keys using a proprietary decryption algorithm designed by his tech firm.
The screen flickered, revealing the hidden ledger: Project Janus.
“Look at this,” Nathan murmured, standing behind my chair and pointing a finger at a series of complex wire transfers routed through three distinct shell companies in the British Virgin Islands.
I leaned in, tracing the numbers with my eyes. “He wasn't just embezzling for Celeste’s townhouse. He was bleeding the entire manufacturing division dry.”
“More than that,” Julian chimed in, walking into the study with a cup of black coffee and setting it beside my hand. “These routing numbers... they belong to a corporate raider out of New York known as Victor Thorne. Thorne has been trying to execute a hostile takeover of our shipping lines for eighteen months. Grant was acting as an inside man, intentionally tanking our quarterly valuations so Thorne could buy us out for pennies on the dollar.”
A cold anger flared in my chest. Grant hadn't just been a domestic abuser; he had been a corporate traitor, willing to sell out my father’s life’s work to the highest bidder just to pad his own bank account and impress his mistress.
“Can we reverse the transfers?” I asked, looking up at Nathan.
Nathan smiled—a sharp, predatory grin that made him look terrifyingly like our late father when he was preparing to crush a competitor.
“Reverse them?” Nathan chuckled softly. “Claire, honey, Silas already intercepted the routing sequence three hours ago. The eighty million Grant tried to wire to Thorne’s Cayman account didn't go to the Caymans. It landed in a frozen holding account managed by our legal team.”
My eyes widened. “Eighty million?”
“And change,” Julian added, adjusting his glasses. “Thorne’s gonna wake up tomorrow morning, look at his portfolio, and realize he just financed his own regulatory audit. Silas is currently scrubbing their servers. By dawn, Thorne’s entire syndicate is going to be facing federal wire fraud charges.”
I leaned back in the leather chair, letting out a long, slow breath. The invisible chains that had bound me to this house, to this marriage, and to the suffocating expectations of the Ashford family were gone. Every single one of them.
“Where is Grant?” I asked.
“Caleb threw him out an hour ago,” Nathan said dismissively. “No coat, no car keys, no wallet. Just the clothes on his back and a bus ticket to Providence. If he steps foot in Boston again, Caleb promised to introduce him to some friends in the scrap metal business.”
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I couldn't help the small, dark laugh that escaped my lips. “You guys are ruthless.”
“We’re protective,” Nathan corrected gently, placing his heavy hand on my shoulder. “You spent seven years taking care of everyone else, Claire. It’s about time you let us take care of you.”
