Chapter 4 - THE SHELL COMPANIESHe thought he was a mastermind playing two women against each other. When he opened his corporate balance sheet, he realized he was broke—and I held his leash.
At two o'clock that afternoon, the heavy mahogany doors of Sarah Jenkins's law office on Michigan Avenue swung open.
Derek looked like a ghost.
His pristine blue Christmas sweater was wrinkled and stained with coffee near the cuff. He hadn't shaved in three days, dark, dark hollows carved deep beneath his eyes. He stumbled into the conference room, clutching a stack of printed bank statements in his shaking hands.
Behind him walked Marcus Vance, my quiet, razor-sharp forensic accountant, wearing a dark gray suit and carrying a leather briefcase.
I sat at the end of the long glass conference table, dressed in a sharp ivory blazer, holding a pen. Sarah sat beside me, her expression as unreadable as a marble statue.
Derek slammed the papers onto the glass table.
"Where is it?!" he shouted, his chest heaving. "Where is the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Naomi?!"
"Sit down, Derek," Sarah commanded, her voice dropping like a heavy iron weight in the quiet room. "If you raise your voice at my client again, I will have security escort you out, and we will file for emergency sole custody and full asset freezing before the court closes today."
Derek swallowed his rage, his knees giving out as he sank into a leather chair across from us. He buried his face in his trembling hands.
"The firm's payroll bounces on Monday," Derek whispered, his voice broken, stripped of all arrogance. "I went to transfer fifty thousand from our reserve account to cover the staff salaries... and it's gone. Vanguard Media took three hundred thousand. Aura Design took four hundred and fifty thousand. The authorization signatures..." He looked up at me, his eyes wild with terror. "The signatures on the electronic transfers... they're mine. But I swear to God, Naomi, I never approved those payments!"
Marcus Vance opened his briefcase, sliding three neat, tabbed folders across the glass toward Derek.
"You approved them every time you logged into your corporate portal from the Soho House in Chicago and the Ritz-Carlton in Miami, Mr. Romano," Marcus explained calmly. "While you were engaged in... personal activities... Miss Amber Vance used your biometric face-ID on your iPad to sign off on monthly vendor invoices she generated herself."
Derek stared at the folders as if they contained live scorpions. "Amber...? No... she... she loved me..."
"Amber didn't love you, Derek," I said, leaning forward, resting my chin on my laced fingers. "Amber loved the fact that you were vain, distracted, and arrogant enough to leave your financial life completely unattended while you chased her youth."
"You knew?" Derek looked at me, a horrifying wave of realization washing over his face. "You knew about this before New Year's Day?!"
"I knew three months ago," I replied evenly.
"Three months?!" he yelled, leaning over the table. "You let her steal three-quarters of a million dollars from my company for three months and didn't tell me?!"
"Correction, Derek," Sarah Jenkins interjected smoothly. "She let Amber transfer the funds while my office legally secured a freeze on those accounts through the State Financial Crimes Unit. The money isn't gone. It is currently held in an escrow lock state under Naomi’s legal name as the fifty-percent shareholder of Romano & Ashford Design."
Derek froze. He looked at me, his eyes wide, terrified, completely overwhelmed.
"You... you have the money?" he gasped.
"I have the money," I confirmed. "I also have the complete record of your gross negligence as managing partner. If I hand these documents over to your investors and your primary clients, your firm will be liquidated by the end of the month, your license will be revoked, and you will be facing personal bankruptcy."
Derek sank back into his chair as if he had been struck by a sledgehammer. Tears of pure, desperate terror welled up in his eyes.
"Naomi... please..." he begged, his hands trembling on the table. "You built this company with me. My father’s name is on the door. If you ruin the firm, we have nothing! Tyler and Sophia will have nothing!"
"Tyler and Sophia will have everything," I said coldly. "Because I am going to save the company. But you are going to pay the price for destroying our family."
"Anything," Derek sobbed, wiping his nose with his sleeve. "I'll do anything, Naomi. Just fix this. Please."
"Here are my terms," Sarah said, sliding a thick legal document across the table.
"First," Sarah listed with lethal precision. "You will surrender your fifty percent ownership stake in Romano & Ashford Design to Naomi immediately. She will become the sole CEO and managing partner. You will be demoted to a senior salaried architect with zero administrative access."
Derek flinched, but he didn't dare object.
"Second," Sarah continued. "You will sign a full, uncontested divorce settlement. Naomi gets the lake house, full legal control of the children's trust funds, and seventy percent of all liquid personal assets. You will move into a two-bedroom rental apartment."
"And the children?" Derek choked out.
"Joint physical custody," I said, stepping in. "Fifty-fifty. Because despite your monumental failures as a husband, you are going to learn how to be a real, present, responsible father. No nannies. No shortcuts. You will raise them alongside me, as an equal partner, or you will not see them at all."
Derek stared at the paper. His signature was required at the bottom of twenty different pages. His entire life—his status, his wealth, his dominance—was being stripped away with a few drops of blue ink.
"What about Amber?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper.
May you like
I stood up, buttoning my ivory blazer, looking down at the broken man who had thought he could humiliate me over cold French toast.
"Amber is waiting for you at your house," I said softly. "I suggest you go home and tell her that her paychecks have officially stopped."
