My husband stole my platinum credit card to take his parents on a trip. When I canceled it, he yelled, “Reactivate it right now or I’m divorcing you!” and his mother swore she’d ᴋɪᴄᴋ me out of the house… I just laughed.

But as they left, Preston gave me a final, lingering look that wasn’t filled with regret, but with a dark promise of revenge. At two in the morning, my head of security called to tell me that someone had tried to bypass the server room at my office using a forged digital signature.

PART 3

The security alert didn’t surprise me, as I was already sitting up in bed with a mountain of forensic accounting files spread across the duvet. When the guard told me the intruder used a cloned keycard, I knew Preston was looking for the original source code for my new software.

He didn’t want his clothes or his golf clubs; he wanted the only thing left that had any market value. The next morning, I arrived at my corporate headquarters to find my CFO, Harrison, waiting with a team of external auditors.

“It’s deeper than we imagined,” Harrison said, sliding a thick binder across the conference table.

Watching the data was like watching a slow-motion car crash. Preston hadn’t just stolen cash; he had tried to put a secret lien on one of my patents to cover a debt to a very dangerous group of private lenders.