Chapter 2 - The Mistake in the Background
I checked into the Four Seasons under my maiden name, ignoring the thirty-four missed calls from Adrien, the eight from Evelyn, and the frantic texts from my friend Lila. I ordered a pot of black coffee, stripped off my pale blue bridesmaid dress, and put on a plush white hotel robe.
At 2:14 a.m., my phone buzzed on the marble nightstand.
It was an unknown number.
I unlocked the screen and opened the message. It was a photograph. No text, just an image.
It was Serena. She was lying in the center of a king-sized bed, wearing nothing but one of Adrien’s white dress shirts. Her hair was perfectly tousled. She was holding up her left hand, proudly displaying my three-carat diamond ring on her middle finger. She was smiling, her eyes heavy with the lazy, satisfied glow of a woman who believed she had just won a war.
She wanted to break me. She wanted me to cry alone in the dark, imagining them together.
But I wasn't looking at Serena.
My eyes were immediately drawn past her shoulder, to the background of the image. The room they were in was not a hotel room. It was Adrien’s private office at the Bennett-Cole headquarters—the office he had claimed he needed to sleep in during "late nights."
In the background, on Adrien's massive mahogany desk, his dual monitors were glowing brightly in the dim room.
I pinched the screen on my phone, zooming in on the monitors. My heart stopped.
Adrien was a charismatic CEO, but he was a terrible engineer. He never remembered to lock his screens, and he always maximized his windows.
The left monitor displayed a private banking portal. It wasn't the Bennett-Cole corporate account. It was a Cayman Islands offshore routing interface.
The right monitor displayed a signed, notarized PDF. Even through the pixelation of the zoom, I could read the bold header: IP TRANSFER AUTHORIZATION: PROJECT ARES.
Project Ares was the proprietary machine-learning algorithm I had spent three years coding. It was the crown jewel of our company, the asset that was about to take us public for an estimated valuation of two hundred million dollars.
My breath turned to ice.
He wasn't just sleeping with his marketing director. He was using her to illegally transfer my proprietary code to an offshore shell company. They were going to gut my life's work, sell the algorithm privately, and leave me holding the empty shell of the corporation.
The bouquet at the wedding hadn't been a cruel joke. It had been a distraction. It was supposed to trigger a dramatic, emotional breakup, making me look like the unstable, jealous ex-fiancée who abandoned her company in a fit of heartbreak, giving him the perfect cover to finalize the transfer while I was busy licking my wounds.
I set the phone down. The cold, mechanical gears of my mind locked into place.
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I didn't just want to cancel the wedding. I didn't just want to fire them. I wanted to reduce their entire existence to ash.
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