He did not know that every tailored suit, every investor dinner, every fake expansion, every hotel suite, gift, driver, mistress, and polished illusion of his success had all come from one source.
And he did not know the source had finally decided the account was closed.
Forty miles away in Darien, Connecticut, his wife stood in front of a locked room at the end of the second-floor hallway of the house Gavin casually called his. Whenever guests wandered too near, he referred to it as storage. The door was steel-cored beneath painted wood. The lock was digital. Behind it, glowing in the dark, was not storage.
It was truth.
Evelyn Reed stepped inside barefoot, one hand under the weight of her seven-month belly, the other holding a glass of water she had forgotten to drink. Three monitors lit the room. One displayed financial streams. One showed a private internal banking dashboard known only to a handful of people. The third showed a live feed from the Bellmont ballroom, where silk and tuxedos moved like polished pieces across a game board.