Chapter 2 - The Stolen Millions
Natalie slammed her foot on the brake pedal the exact moment I read the text out loud.
The car jerked violently, skidding to a harsh halt on the gravel shoulder of the empty road.
We sat in the suffocating darkness, breathing heavily and listening to the engine idle.
I looked out the rear window, fully expecting to see Daniel's headlights rushing toward us.
There was absolutely nothing but pitch blackness behind us.
Natalie asked how Daniel could possibly know our exact location on an unnamed backroad.
I opened my laptop in the passenger seat and booted it up with trembling fingers.
My hands shook as I accessed our shared family cloud account to check his device history.
Daniel wasn't tracking my cellular signal.
He was tracking a hidden GPS tag he had secretly installed in Natalie's car three weeks ago.
I realized with horrifying clarity that he had known about my escape plan the entire time.
Natalie grabbed a heavy flashlight from the glove compartment and crawled under the rear bumper of her car.
A moment later, she returned with a small magnetic black box clutched in her hand.
She smashed it against the wet asphalt with her heavy boot until it splintered into useless plastic shards.
We didn't dare go back to the main highway.
We took winding backroads until we found a cheap motel on the absolute edge of the city limits.
Once inside the dingy room, I spread the stolen financial documents across the sagging mattress.
I desperately needed to find out why Daniel was so determined to stop me from leaving with these specific files.
I looked closer at the routing numbers on the offshore transfer receipts.
My lawyer had originally told me Daniel moved our savings into a secret personal account.
But as I cross-referenced the account codes with corporate tax records I had copied, a terrifying pattern emerged.
Daniel hadn't just stolen two hundred and forty thousand dollars from our marriage.
He had embezzled nearly four million dollars from his own company over the past two years.
And the secret offshore account he transferred the stolen money into wasn't in his name.
I stared at the name printed on the master account, feeling the air leave my lungs completely.
The offshore account holding the stolen four million dollars was in my name.
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Daniel wasn't just leaving me for a younger woman.
He was framing me for massive corporate fraud, and I had just walked right into his trap.
