"Look at your screen, Elowen. Right now."
Hattie’s voice crackled through the computer speakers, sharp with forty years of industry grit. My master seamstress didn't waste time on pleasantries.
I clicked the email attachment she had just sent. A massive spreadsheet populated my laptop monitor, rows of red numbers glaring back at me.
"What am I looking at, Hattie?" I leaned closer to the glass desk, my pen poised over a blank notepad.
"The six-month fabric reconciliation," Hattie said. "I went down to the physical archives this morning to pull the actual shipping manifests. Compare them to the digital ledger Kai submitted to accounting."
I scanned the top row. French Chantilly lace.
"He logged thirty yards at twelve hundred a yard," I read aloud.
"And the actual invoice from Lyons says four hundred," Hattie snapped. "Check the freshwater pearls for the bridal line. He billed the company six dollars per pearl. We pay two."
My chest tightened. "A three-hundred-percent markup across the board."
"Every single import since last October," Hattie confirmed. "He inflated the raw material costs on paper, approved the purchase orders himself, and cut the checks."
"Where did the difference go?" Chloe asked from across the hotel room, pacing the carpet. "If the French suppliers only charged a third of that money, where did the rest of the cash land?"
I switched tabs on my browser, logging directly into the corporate treasury portal. I pulled up the clearing destinations for the inflated lace and pearl wire transfers.
"Not to France," I said, my voice dropping. "Look at the routing numbers."
Chloe stopped pacing and leaned over my shoulder. "That’s a domestic routing code."
"It’s Serena’s gallery," I said. "He routed the excess material budget directly into her business checking account."
"He's paying her rent?" Chloe asked.
"Rent, utility bills, and art acquisitions," I said, clicking through the itemized deposit receipts. "Here. Fifty thousand dollars marked as 'Consulting Fees' deposited the exact same day our lace budget cleared. And another twenty-five thousand last Tuesday for 'Gallery Installations.'"
"Look at the bottom entries," Hattie interjected over the speaker. "The personal withdrawals."
I scrolled down. The corporate account fed into a secondary operating fund, which Kai had systematically bled for the past twelve months.
"Ten thousand at a boutique jeweler in Manhattan," I read. "Fifteen thousand to a luxury car rental agency for a vintage Aston Martin. Eight thousand at a high-end leather goods store in Milan."
"You didn't go to Milan last fall," Chloe noted.
"No," I replied, staring at a transaction dated October fourteenth. "I was in New York prepping the autumn runway. But Serena posted photos from Italy that exact week."
"He funded her entire European vacation on company dimes," Hattie said, her tone thick with disgust. "And that isn't the worst part, Elowen. Go to tab three. Look at the authorization slips."
I clicked the third tab. Dozens of scanned reimbursement forms filled the screen. Each one authorized thousands of dollars in petty cash for client fittings and rush-order fabric sourcing.
At the bottom of each form sat a signature.
"These are our private clients," I said, zooming in on a slip dated three weeks ago. "Lady Aris. Mrs. Kensington. The Duchess of York."
"Did they sign off on those rush fees?" Chloe asked.
"No," I said, my eyes tracing the loops of ink. "I know Beatrice Kensington’s handwriting. We went to design school together. Her signature slants left. This slants right."
"He forged them," Hattie said. "Every single client signature on those forty expense slips is a fake. He used their names to pull cash straight out of the vault, claiming they demanded expedited fabric imports."
"That is federal wire fraud and identity theft," Chloe said, grabbing her phone. "I'm sending these ledger screenshots to Sterling right now."
My laptop dinged with an incoming call from Sterling. I merged him into the voice conference immediately.
"Tell me you're seeing the bank routing data, Sterling," I said.
"I see it," the attorney replied. "And I just found where the rest of his time is going when he isn't playing art collector with your company funds."
"What did you find?"
"A commercial lease agreement signed four months ago," Sterling said. "An industrial warehouse on the outskirts of the city. No zoning permits, no business registration tied to your primary brand."
"Why would Kai rent a warehouse in the suburbs?" I asked.
"He bought twelve industrial sewing machines at auction last month," Sterling explained. "And he hired six non-contract seamstresses paid entirely under the table."
Hattie gasped over the line. "A sweatshop?"
"A reproduction facility," Sterling corrected. "My investigator pulled the utility records and took photos through the loading bay doors this morning. They are mass-producing cheap polyester knock-offs of your signature designs."
"The Pearl Queen," I whispered.
"And the entire spring catalog," Sterling added. "He has hundreds of units boxed up and labeled for export to overseas discount distributors."
"He's diluting the brand," Chloe said, her face pale. "If those cheap replicas hit the international market under our designs, our high-end buyers will drop us overnight."
"Where is the export money going?" I demanded, tapping the desk with my pen. "If he's selling knock-offs, where does the revenue land?"
"An unregistered offshore account in the Cayman Islands," Sterling answered. "Completely hidden from the IRS and entirely detached from your marital assets. He planned to run the brand into the ground, siphon every dollar of equity into Serena’s gallery and his offshore accounts, and leave you holding the bankrupt shell."
"And the two-point-five million he wired to Serena this morning?" I asked.
"That was the final blow," Sterling said. "He liquidated your primary operating reserves to buy her that lakefront property outright before the court injunction could hit the banking system."
"Can we pull the wire back?" Chloe asked.
"The wire is currently sitting in a clearing house queue due to the size of the transfer," Sterling said. "It hits Serena’s escrow account at noon today. Once it lands, recovering it will take months of litigation."
I looked at the digital clock in the corner of my screen.
It read 10:15 AM.
"We have less than two hours," I said.
"We need a judge to sign the emergency freeze before that clearing house releases the funds," Sterling said. "I am walking into the courthouse right now with Gable's affidavit and the ledger proofs you just sent."
"I'm coming to the courthouse," I said, standing up and shutting my laptop.
"No," Sterling countered. "You need to keep Kai distracted. If he logs into the banking portal and sees the freeze pending, he can reroute the clearing house destination to an untraceable crypto wallet before the judge strikes the gavel."
"How do I distract him?"
"Call him," Sterling said. "Play the oblivious wife. Keep him on the phone, keep him comfortable, and whatever you do, do not let him check his accounts until twelve o'one."
I picked up my cell phone from the glass table. My thumb hovered over Kai’s contact name.
"Chloe, pack the documents," I ordered. "Hattie, lock down the main workshop. Nobody gets in or out without my personal authorization."
"Understood," Hattie said before disconnecting.
I took a deep breath, staring at the black screen of my phone.
Then, the device buzzed in my hand.
An incoming text message popped up from an unknown number.
I opened it.
It was a photo of my hotel room door, taken from the hallway outside just seconds ago.
Below the picture sat a single line of text:
*Open up, Elowen. We need to talk about the wire transfer.*
