Luca lifted his glass. “Marriage eventually. Exclusivity immediately.”
Sterling Global had been my father’s company before he d*ed.
Everett Sterling built it over thirty years, freight and logistics, four thousand employees — and two years after we bur*ied him, his widow was serving his daughter to an investor between the salad and the fish course.
“You cannot promise me to anyone, Wendy,” I said.
Wendy smiled. “Don’t be childish, Jessi. Your father left you eighteen percent. Luca wants stability. You sign your shares into the voting pool, stand beside him publicly, and everyone wins.”
“Everyone except me.”
Luca closed his hand around my wrist.
His rings were cold.
“You haven’t thought long term, sweetie.”
I pulled my arm free. “Touch me again and you’ll regret it.”
Wendy laughed. “There’s the little accountant pretending she has teeth.”
She still saw the grieving daughter who kept her head down in the finance department, grateful for a desk in her own father’s building.
And why wouldn’t she.
For two years I had been exactly that girl.
After my father d*ed, Wendy inherited control and I inherited a cubicle, and I took it, because grief makes you small and because the ledger was the last place that still smelled like him.
She gave me the accounts nobody wanted — reconciliations, vendor files, the tedious back rooms of the business — and she called it “keeping you busy, dear,” and she thought she was burying me.
She was handing me the keys.
Because you cannot hide a th*ft from the person who reconciles the accounts, and Wendy Sterling had never once, in her life, reconciled anything.
She did not know that for six weeks, I had quietly compared vendor payments against archived contracts and found millions routed through shell consultants linked to her brother.
She did not know I had copied altered invoices, f*rged bank authorizations, and backdated board records.
She did not know three encrypted backups existed.
And she did not know I had scheduled one file to auto-release to regulators at midnight unless I cancelled it.
When I stood up from the table, two heavy-set men appeared near the exit doors.
Wendy set down her glass.
“Sit down, Jessi,” she ordered.
I ran.
Down the service hall my father used to sneak desserts through, past the kitchen, into the guest bathroom with the narrow stained-glass window.
I locked the door.
