What Jason didn’t know was that Daniel’s briefcase held a second, far more explosive folder. A folder detailing the proprietary corporate data Jason had stolen from my firm to secure a new job. I hadn’t authorized Daniel to deploy it yet. You never show the executioner’s axe until the prisoner thinks they’ve negotiated a pardon.
“Let’s go back to the apartment, Cat,” Jason pleaded, his arrogance replaced by a pathetic whine. “We can hash this out in private. There’s no need for lawyers.”
I felt a wave of profound exhaustion wash over me. When he was draining my accounts and drafting predatory divorce papers, he hadn’t considered privacy. Only now, staring down the barrel of financial ruin, did he remember the sanctity of marriage.
“There is no ‘private’ anymore,” I said, standing up and shouldering my purse. “I am going to strip away everything you stole through deceit. And what you owe me for this betrayal… you lack the currency to ever repay.”
I turned my back on them. Daniel stood smoothly, gathering his files. As I reached the top of the stairs, I heard the sharp screech of a chair being pushed back, and Allison’s panicked voice crying out, “Jason!” I didn’t turn around. Looking back at a corpse only traps you in the graveyard.
Chapter 4: The Corporate Guillotine
The evening wind hitting Madison Avenue felt sharp, carrying the scent of impending rain and roasted nuts from a street vendor. Daniel walked beside me in companionable silence. He didn’t offer hollow platitudes, which I profoundly respected.
“Are you stable?” Daniel finally asked, his voice low.
I watched a florist bundling sunflowers at the corner. My mother used to aggressively scrub the baseboards whenever our family hit a crisis. The women in my bloodline didn’t collapse; we sought tasks.
“The wound is cauterized,” I replied. “But this doesn’t end with the division of assets, Daniel. The data on his hard drive… I’m bringing it to your office tonight.”
An hour later, I sat in Daniel’s seventh-floor office overlooking Central Park. The city lights smeared across the rain-slicked windows. Daniel handed me a mug of chamomile tea. I set a sleek, silver USB flash drive on his desk.
“I pulled these from his home office computer,” I explained, staring at the drive as if it were radioactive. “I wasn’t snooping. I was looking for our old tax returns. But I found a nested folder.”
Daniel plugged the drive into his secure laptop. As he clicked through the directories, his brow furrowed, deepening into a trench of absolute gravity. The silence in the room stretched until it felt brittle.
“Are you absolutely certain this is Jason’s user profile?” Daniel asked, his eyes glued to a PDF.
“Positive. The metadata matches his machine, and those are his personal email backups.”
Daniel half-closed the laptop, removing his glasses. “Catherine, if this data is authentic, we have crossed the Rubicon. This isn’t infidelity. He has been systematically exporting proprietary budgets, classified client rosters, and Q3 deliverables from your company. He is transmitting corporate intelligence to a direct competitor.”
My heart shrank, condensing into a hard, cold knot. “I’ve given eight years of my life to that firm. I built those deliverables with my team. He used my late nights and my security clearance to buy himself a Director role at a rival agency.”
“If you bring this to light, your executives will show him no mercy. There will be federal implications for corporate espionage,” Daniel warned gently. “What do you want to do?”
