Chapter 7 - The Enemy of My Enemy
Chapter 7 - The Enemy of My Enemy
The social media victory bought us breathing room, but Thomas was still a threat. He was barricaded in his suite, communicating only through his ruthless lawyers, threatening to tie up the ownership of the lodge in litigation for decades. The black ledger was circumstantial without the corresponding bank routing numbers, which Thomas had hidden on a separate encrypted drive.
That afternoon, there was a timid knock on my office door.
I opened it to find Sarah—the woman in the green dress, Julian’s former fiancé. She looked exhausted, her makeup smudged, clutching a sleek silver laptop to her chest.
"Can I come in?" she asked quietly.
I hesitated, then stepped aside. "Have a seat, Sarah."
She sat on the edge of the sofa, looking around nervously. "Julian is a monster," she said, her voice shaking. "I loved him, and he used me. When you fired him... he came to my room. He was frantic. He tried to force me to give him my life savings so he could run. When I said no, he got violent." She touched a faint bruise on her wrist. "Security intervened and threw him out."
"I am so sorry, Sarah," I said gently, sitting beside her.
"Don't be. You saved me from marrying him," she said, managing a weak smile. She handed me the silver laptop. "Julian was Thomas’s lapdog. He kept backups of everything. All the wire transfers, the encrypted files, the offshore accounts. Julian bragged about it to me once, said it was his 'insurance policy' against Thomas. He left the laptop in my room when he ran."
I opened the laptop. It was password protected.
"The password is 'AlpineKing'," Sarah said with a bitter laugh. "He always had a god complex."
I typed it in. The screen unlocked, revealing hundreds of folders. The smoking gun. It was everything we needed to put Thomas away for a decade.
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"Why are you giving this to me?" I asked.
Sarah looked me in the eye. "Because women like us need to look out for each other. Destroy them, Elena."
