My groom slapped me in front of four hundred guests because I refused to repeat the vows he had written. His mother laughed and said, “Now she’ll learn obedience.” I wiped the blood from my split lip, removed my ring, and handed the microphone to the woman in the front row. “Detective,” I said calmly, “you may play the recording now.” The groom’s smile vanished when his voice filled the cathedral. - True Stories

I left the apartment with my face entirely composed, refusing to give Evan the satisfaction of seeing my terror. But inside, I was suffocating. Evan had weaponized the one thing I cared about more than money—my father’s pristine reputation.

I drove straight to the company’s off-site records warehouse on the edge of the city. If Evan was going to frame my father for bribery, he needed the historical site blueprints to alter them. I had to secure the original documents before he could get his hands on them.

I arrived at 2:00 AM. The industrial park was pitch black.

As I pulled my car around the corner, my stomach dropped into my shoes.

Thick, black smoke was billowing out of the warehouse roof. Orange flames licked the sides of the metal loading dock. Fire alarms were blaring into the night sky, and the distant wail of sirens echoed down the highway.

I slammed the brakes, jumping out of the car. The heat hit my face like a physical wall.

Everything was burning. The paper archives, the original blueprints, my father’s handwritten journals—decades of Quinn Restoration history was turning into ash before my eyes.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket. It was Evan.

I answered it, my eyes locked on the collapsing roof of the warehouse.

“Tragic news about the archive facility tonight, baby,” Evan’s voice floated through the speaker, dripping with fake sympathy. “Must have been an electrical fault. Such a shame all those old records are gone. It’s a good thing I have digital backups of the... revised blueprints.”

He had burned it down. He had destroyed the only proof of my father’s innocence.