Chapter 3 - The Woman Derek Was Really ProtectingThey put Sloane in the library.
Security waited outside.
Derek remained in the living room under watch, stripped of his phone, laptop, and company access. He kept demanding to speak to me alone. I refused.
Ten minutes later, I entered the library with my father and Eleanor.
Sloane was no longer smug. She sat stiffly on the sofa, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
“You have three minutes,” I told her.
Her eyes lifted to mine.
“I wasn’t supposed to end up in the middle of this,” she said.
I almost laughed.
“You sat in my chair and watched my husband hit me.”
Her gaze dropped. “I know.”
“Then start talking.”
Sloane took a shaky breath.
“I met Derek at a conference in Charlotte eight months ago. He told me you were cold, unstable, and obsessed with controlling the company. He said he was trapped in a marriage arranged by your father. He said once he was free, he’d restructure everything.”
“Using forged signatures?” my father asked.
She looked at him, then back at me.
“He said he had help.”
“Who?”
Sloane hesitated too long.
Eleanor leaned forward. “Speak clearly, or I end this interview and let the fraud team take you first.”
Sloane’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Nora Benton.”
I froze.
Nora Benton was Langford Logistics’ chief financial officer.
She had worked with my father for fifteen years.
She attended my wedding.
She sent me flowers after my grandmother died.
“No,” I said automatically.
Sloane shook her head. “She set up the account pathways. Derek called her the ‘real engine.’ He said she knew every trust wall, every reporting delay, every weak point.”
My father said nothing.
That frightened me.
He was not surprised enough.
“She and Derek moved money through vendor inflation and ghost maintenance contracts,” Sloane continued. “The company card was nothing. The real money went offshore.”
“How much?” Eleanor asked.
Sloane swallowed. “Last I heard? Just over twelve million.”
The number hit like a blow.
I stared at her.
“Twelve million?”
“She said if the trust stayed in your name, they could never truly control the empire. So Derek had to either get your signature… or get you declared incompetent.”
“And you?” I asked. “What was your reward?”
“An executive title. Equity. Public standing. A future.”
My father’s expression turned to stone.
Sloane reached into her purse with trembling hands—slowly, because security was watching through the glass.
She pulled out a flash drive.
“I started recording things after I realized Derek lies even when he sleeps,” she said. “At first I thought I could protect myself. Then I heard something I couldn’t ignore.”
Eleanor took the drive.
“What?”
Sloane looked directly at me.
“He said if the conservatorship failed, there was still the staircase.”
A cold silence fell.
“The staircase?” I repeated.
“He said one fall in this house would solve everything faster than court.”
My father’s jaw flexed once.
I had never seen him look murderous before.
But then Sloane added the one sentence that shifted the ground again:
“And Derek didn’t start this plan. Nora did.”
Eleanor inserted the drive into a secured laptop.
A hidden-camera clip loaded.
The image was grainy, but clear enough.
Nora Benton stood inside my bedroom office two weeks earlier.
She was opening my personal safe.
Using my code.
My father stared at the screen.
Then, very quietly, he said:
May you like
“She knew a code only your mother knew.”
Cliffhanger: Derek had betrayed me. Sloane had lied to me. But the deepest cut came from somewhere older—someone who had reached into my life through a secret only my late mother was supposed to know.
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