My husband dumped me unconscious outside an emergency room, then calmly told police I had attacked him. His mother pointed at the fingerprints around my throat and claimed I’d put them there myself, but neither of them knew a recorder hidden beneath my clothing had captured the moment Beckett strangled me and the chilling words his mother whispered while he did it.

"You can't go anywhere in your condition!" Dr. Scott shouted as she burst through the door, seeing me standing upright in a pair of hospital scrubs Claire had brought me.

"My fractured ribs will heal, Doctor," I said, looking her dead in the eye. "But if I don't stop this transfer within the next six hours, my father's company will be dismantled, and the people who tried to kill me will walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars."

Dr. Scott looked at my swollen face, then at Officer Thompson, who slowly nodded in agreement.

"If you go, I'm sending an off-duty paramedic with you," Dr. Scott insisted, throwing her hands up. "And you wear a chest binder."

Thirty minutes later, Claire, Officer Thompson, and I were seated inside an unmarked police SUV, speeding down the highway toward the dense pine forests of Oakridge.

While Thompson drove, Claire patched her laptop into Vanguard's internal corporate communications system. A notification flashed across the screen: EMERGENCY BOARD MEETING CALLED FOR 2:00 PM.

"Look at this," Claire said, turning the screen to me. "An emergency shareholder vote has been scheduled by an anonymous proxy holding thirty-five percent of voting shares—the exact percentage held in your father's estate trust."

"Who called the meeting?" I asked.

"The petition was submitted by Marcus Sterling," Claire replied.

Marcus Sterling. Vanguard's Chief Operating Officer. The man my father had trusted to run daily operations, the man who had mentored me when I took over as CEO. His signature was the third name listed in my father's secret journal.

"Marcus was in on it from the beginning," I whispered, betrayal twisting like a knife in my gut. "He was the insider who facilitated the digital transfer on the network side!"

"If Marcus gets the board to recognize those transferred shares at two o'clock," Claire warned, "he will have enough voting power to strip you of your CEO title and sell the company's core military contracts to an overseas conglomerate."