HE BROUGHT HIS MISTRESS TO STRIP ME OF EVERYTHING IN COURT, BUT WHEN I TOOK OFF MY COAT, THE ENTIRE ROOM DISCOVERED THE SINS HE BURIED TEN YEARS AGO

At ten-thirty that morning, while the boardroom victory was sending shockwaves through Wall Street, Daniel Brooks received an urgent call on his private line.

It was Madison Brooks.

She was calling from a burner phone in the parking garage of an upscale shopping plaza in Oak Brook, miles away from the media swarming the downtown penthouse.

"Mr. Brooks... Daniel... please," Madison wept into the phone, her voice shaking with unvarnished terror. "I need to see you. I need to make a deal. Jason has completely lost his mind. He’s going to get us all killed or sent to prison for life!"

Twenty minutes later, Daniel and I sat in a private, soundproof consultation room at a satellite law office in the western suburbs.

The door opened, and Madison slipped inside.

She looked entirely different from the smug, glamorous mistress who had strutted into Courtroom 4B yesterday morning wearing a designer white dress. She was wearing an oversized black hoodie, dark sunglasses, no makeup, and sweatpants. Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely hold her purse.

She saw me sitting next to Daniel and stopped dead in her tracks, taking a fearful step backward toward the door.

"I... I thought you would be alone, Daniel," Madison stammered.

"Mrs. Mitchell is my client," Daniel replied coldly, gesturing toward the empty chair across the table. "Whatever you have to say to me, you say to her. Take a seat, Ms. Brooks, or the door is behind you, and the federal marshals will pick you up at your home within the hour."

Madison swallowed hard and slowly crept toward the chair, sitting on the very edge of the cushion as if it were on fire.

"Iris... look," Madison began, her voice cracking with desperation. "I didn't know the full story. I swear to God I didn't know! Jason told me you were completely insane. He told me you suffered brain damage in the lab fire and that you were living in a private sanitarium because you couldn't take care of yourself! He told me the divorce was just a formality to clean up old legal trusts!"

I looked at her with neither anger nor pity. I simply saw an opportunist who had bet everything on a monster, only to realize the monster was made of paper.

"You signed your name as the sole beneficiary of Aegis Holdings, Madison," I said calmly. "You spent four hundred thousand dollars of my money on Cartier jewelry in Paris last summer. You wore my mother's emerald pendant to the Met Gala."

Madison flinched, pulling her hoodie tighter around herself.

"I'll give it all back!" she cried, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. "I brought the jewelry! It's in the bag! I'll sign over every single penny in the Cayman accounts! I never touched the core funds—Jason controlled the passwords, but I have the dual-authentication backup key! I have his private ledger!"

She reached into her purse and pulled out a velvet pouch containing the stolen family heirlooms, along with an encrypted military-grade USB drive.

"What is on that drive, Ms. Brooks?" Daniel asked, leaning forward.

"Everything," Madison whispered, wiping her nose with the sleeve of her hoodie. "Jason was paranoid. He recorded every single phone call he made from his study for the last five years. He has recordings of the local building inspectors he bribed after the 2017 fire. He has the audio of the private conversations with the toxicologist who altered Iris's hospital charts. And... and he has the recording from last night."

Daniel's eyes narrowed. "What recording from last night?"

Madison began to tremble uncontrollably. "Last night... after the hearing... Jason called a man named Victor Vance. No relation to your father, Iris. He's an enforcer for an organized crime syndicate in South Chicago. Jason paid him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in untraceable cryptocurrency to stage a car crash on your way to the courthouse this morning."

A chilling silence fell over the room.

Daniel’s face hardened into stone. He immediately pulled out his tablet and began typing commands to his security division.

"Why are you giving this to us, Madison?" I asked, looking straight into her tear-filled eyes. "You could have run to an airport. You could have tried to flee the country."

"Because Jason told me last night that if things went wrong, he was going to tell the feds that I was the mastermind behind the offshore embezzlement," Madison sobbed, burying her face in her hands. "He told me he had drafted fake emails showing I blackmailed him into transferring the money! He was going to feed me to the wolves to save his own skin! He doesn't love anyone, Iris! He doesn't care about anyone in the world except himself!"

I looked at the USB drive sitting on the table between us.

"Daniel," I said softly.

"Yes, Iris?"

"Call the United States Attorney’s Office. Tell them we don't just have a civil asset recovery case anymore."