My Cheating Husband Smirked When He Kept The House—Until My Movers Stripped It Down To The Bare Floorboards / Chapter 8 / 20

Chapter 8 - The Poisoned WellTo catch a rat, you don't burn down the kitchen. You leave out a piece of cheese dipped in arsenic.

We didn't fire the intern. We didn't let him leave the room. Instead, I sat him down at his computer and stood behind him, radiating absolute, terrifying authority.

"You are going to text Chloe," I commanded coldly. "You are going to tell her that the blueprints you gave her were just the preliminary drafts. Tell her that I just finalized the real structural load-bearing schematics, and without them, the glass terraces will collapse during construction."

The intern’s hands shook violently as he typed the message.

Less than a minute later, Chloe replied: Get them. Name your price.

"Tell her twenty thousand," Carter instructed, his voice smooth and lethal. "And tell her you’ll leave the encrypted flash drive taped under the third bench in the park across the street at midnight."

While the intern set the trap, I sat at my drafting table. I didn't design a masterpiece. I designed a ticking time bomb.

I took the stolen Azure blueprints and meticulously altered the structural mathematics. I changed the load-bearing calculations for the cantilevered glass pools. To a layman, or a junior manager like Chloe, the blueprints looked like brilliant architectural genius. To any master engineer who actually tried to build it, it was a catastrophic death trap that would buckle under its own weight.

At midnight, Carter and I sat in his black SUV, parked in the shadows across from the park. We watched as Chloe, wearing a trench coat, hurried to the park bench, snatched the flash drive, and practically ran back to her car, looking incredibly smug.

"She took the bait," Carter murmured, his hand resting warmly on my thigh.

"She’s going to hand those blueprints directly to the CEO of Crestview tomorrow morning for the final presentation," I said, a dark, victorious thrill coursing through my veins.