57

In the low light from the dashboard, Victoria thumbed through the disorganized pile of Warren’s secret papers. Because that’s how she was thinking about them now: the thing he was hiding. The talk they were supposed to have after the Gala. Her gut screamed that these were dots worth connecting, and that intuition hadn’t steered her wrong yet. The red flags were waving too hard for this to be dismissed as coincidence.

So she read the documents.

And she read them again.

And still, she couldn’t believe.

Hands shaking, she stared unseeingly out the window, one thought throbbing in her mind: How?

How had this happened?

How had Warren let this happen?

How had she been so obtuse?

Margaret, that bitch, was right. Livingston was on the brink of bankruptcy. Past the brink. A breath away from full-on crisis.

The truth was there in black and white. Warren had done an excellent job covering his tracks, fudging reports to hide the real numbers. Expense accounts and initial assessments. A draft of a lender contract with a company she recognized as one of Barnaby Connors’s investments.

They were drowning.

How could he have done this to her?

“You’re lucky you’re dead,” she gritted. That lying, deceitful dick. Victoria warred with a strong desire to reincarnate his lying corpse and kill him again. Maybe three times. Painfully. She gripped the wheel and squeezed. Squeezed. Squeezed.

Rage reduced to a simmer but didn’t dissipate completely. It wasn’t just that the financials were screwed, and she’d probably been days, a week tops, away from discovering this without the hidden papers. Warren’s investments were . . . suspect. First-year stats class failure-level suspect. She’d have to fine-tooth-comb it, but he’d made rookie mistakes—careless, unvetted errors in judgment.

Victoria reviewed months’ worth of bank statements, her finger grazing over the account number and a list of outgoing transactions. She flipped pages and took another proverbial bullet when it turned out to be a statement for an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

“What the hell,” she said, utter disbelief draining the adrenaline from her system.

Warren had a Cayman Islands account.

Warren was using Livingston to maintain a shell account—maybe more than one; she wouldn’t know for sure until she dug deeper, but one was one more than he should’ve had.

And she hadn’t suspected a goddamn thing.

The last item on the activity list was a pending transfer that yanked the floor out from beneath her feet. Warren had been preparing to send almost a quarter of a million dollars to someone just days before he’d been murdered.

The recipient’s name wasn’t listed, and the identifying information was incomplete. A PO Box. A local number that she didn’t recognize and a generic email address. Wasn’t much to go on, but this wasn’t an accident, nor was it a client taking advantage of a legal loophole.

Because despite appearances, Warren knew exactly what he was doing.

“Really lucky you’re dead,” she said.

It was like she’d slipped into an alternate reality. Warren hadn’t just fooled her once. He’d been lying to her every day. Deceiving her on a level she would’ve said he wasn’t capable of. This was the same man whose mother had done his laundry until he was twenty-three. The man who’d put a metal tin of leftovers in the microwave and almost blew up the kitchen. Those weren’t the traits of this cunning and ruthless and—wait.

She’d tossed page after page on the floor as the revelations became apparent, but now came to a stop at the sheet in front of her: a scanned contract between Livingston Corporation and a medical company.

What was Warren doing meddling in the medical field?

Livingston had a health-care division, but they rarely, if ever, interacted on the same accounts. They were run by different executives, followed different federal and state guidelines. A medical practice was outside of Warren’s purview. According to this, though, Warren had promised a substantial sum to a startup of a private practice.

Copies of emails followed, and Victoria came untethered. For months, Warren had been putting out feelers—nothing egregious, just testing the waters. Keeping his proposals hypothetical. Expressing interest in an independent venture, which was bullshit speak for screwing Victoria over. Starting fresh, he’d written. A new opportunity.

Victoria trembled with anger.

Warren had intended to ground Livingston—and destroy her in the process—so he could invest in a . . . private medical practice?

Madness.

No one in their sector would’ve advised him that this was a good idea. If she’d had any inclination before he died that this was his intention, Victoria would’ve quashed it before it had even left the gate.

This was—

“No,” she moaned, dragging out the word in horror as everything finally clicked into place. The answer was so glaringly obvious in the space between the lies.

Only one person could have convinced Warren to make that move.