“I loved the idea of watching you walk into a room and believe you owned it. When all along, you were holding something that belonged to me.”
“Belonged to you?”
“My father’s money built this company.”
The room seemed to freeze.
“Your father was a witness.”
“My father was the whistleblower who exposed a network of corruption. And Richard Hayes took the evidence, buried it, and rebuilt his reputation on top of it.”
Pressure built behind my temples.
“That’s not what happened.”
“Isn’t it? Ask him.”
Dad wasn’t there.
I had left him sitting at the kitchen table, pale and silent.
But his silence had already answered more than I wanted to know.
“He used those funds to create Hayes Capital,” Claire continued. “He told everyone it was family money. It was not. It was evidence money. Tainted money. My father’s blood money.”
“If that were true, regulators would have discovered it years ago.”
“They would have, if Richard Hayes hadn’t buried it so deep that even the trustees didn’t know where it came from.”
She pulled a folder from her bag.
“I have the original ledger.”
My heart pounded.
“You can’t prove that.”
“I don’t need to prove it,” she replied. “I only need enough doubt to trigger an audit. And once the audit begins, the whole tower of cards will fall.”
She slid the ledger across the table.
I left it untouched.
