Chapter 6 - The Architect
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I stared at my bruised face in the gilded mirror as I cleaned the sticky buttercream from my skin.
Derek controlled our joint household accounts, but he had made one fatal mistake when he targeted me: he had never truly understood my financial history.
Before I ever met Derek Hayes at a charity gala eighteen months ago, I had spent twelve long, grueling years building a specialized medical-software corporation alongside my college roommate. We started in a tiny garage, working eighty-hour weeks until our patient-data algorithm became the industry standard across three hospital networks.
When we sold the controlling interest to a global healthcare conglomerate three years ago, I kept a crucial ten-percent equity stake and walked away with enough capital to secure my independence forever.
Derek knew I had money—he had seen my townhouse and my car—but he assumed I was just a fortunate girl who had stumbled into a lucky payout. He assumed my gentle demeanor meant I was soft, stupid, and easily manipulated.
Worse for him, he believed that marrying me would automatically merge our financial worlds and give him unfettered control over my portfolio.
That arrogant assumption had made him careless.
Three months ago, while going through our shared wedding planning folder on our home computer, I discovered a draft of an unauthorized loan document. Derek had quietly tried to use my corporate equity documents to open a two-million-dollar credit facility to bail out his failing hedge fund investments.
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And he hadn't worked alone.
Search history and retrieved cloud backups revealed a long thread of emails between Derek and his mother, Patricia.
