“Your father has been dead for less than twenty-four hours and you have already signed to give me his company. What a shame you never learned to read before trusting your husband.”
Gavin Barrett dropped the folder onto the marble table in the family home in Highland Hills. I was still dressed in black. The flowers from my father Ross Albright’s funeral still filled the house with that sweet scent that becomes unbearable when grief leaves you breathless.
For three days, Gavin had played the perfect husband. He received condolences, hugged the partners of Summit Enterprises, and swore before everyone that he would protect my father’s legacy. But that night, there was no tenderness left in his eyes.
Beside him, my mother-in-law, Celina, had taken off her mourning clothes. She was wearing a red dress, the pearls I had given her for Christmas, and a smile she was not trying to hide.
“The company is bankrupt,” Gavin said, looking down at me with utter contempt. “Your father left billions of dollars in debt, and if you do not transfer your sixty percent stake, the banks are going to tear the group apart.”
I opened the folder with trembling hands. My signature was on the last page.
Then I remembered a night two weeks earlier. I had a fever, and Gavin arrived with urgent papers from the bank. He held my hand, gave me tea, and pointed to where I should sign. They were not authorizations. They were the divorce papers and the complete transfer of my shares.
“You deceived me,” I whispered, looking up at him as my heart shattered.
“I made it easier for you to make a decision you would never have had the courage to make,” he replied coldly.
I got up, trembling with a mixture of rage and grief.
“My father hired you when you were an analyst with no contacts,” I said, my voice shaking. “He made you a director, opened his home to you, and treated you like a son.”
Gavin let out a dry, cruel laugh.
“He treated me like a servant,” he sneered, stepping closer. “I had to put up with his spoiled daughter for four years to get here, and stupidity is also a death sentence, Naomi.”
I slapped him across the face with all the strength I had left.
Celina lunged at me, grabbed my hair, and slammed me against the corner of a heavy wooden table. Gavin did not stop her. He just watched before calmly calling security.
“Get her out,” he ordered the guards who walked in. “No phone, no cards, and no suitcase, because this house no longer belongs to her.”
“My father bought it!” I screamed, struggling against the heavy hands on my shoulders.
“Your father is dead,” Gavin replied, turning his back on me.
Two guards dragged me through the lobby while Celina yelled that I was not even fit to run a kitchen. Outside, a terrible storm was raging over Oakville. They left me barefoot behind the gate, my blouse soaked, with a cut on my forehead.
From the balcony, Gavin raised a glass of whiskey.
“Let us see how long a princess lasts without money,” he shouted over the wind.
The heavy iron gates closed. I walked down the street in the pouring rain, not knowing where to go, until an idea struck me with more force than the cold. Gavin had prepared those documents before my father’s accident.
And if he had planned the robbery before his death, perhaps he had also planned his death.
I wiped the blood from my lip and looked one last time at the grand house that had just been taken from me.
“Enjoy this evening,” I murmured into the dark night. “Because you do not yet know who you have just awakened.”
What happened next was so impossible that even I would not have been able to believe it.
