Chapter 7 - The DNA Deception
The private investigator worked faster than I could have anticipated.
By nightfall, I was sitting in my penthouse suite, going over a mountain of digital surveillance files.
Sophie was asleep in the adjacent room, entirely unaware of the absolute war raging around her.
I felt a pang of guilt for the chaos, but I knew I had to eliminate every threat to ensure her permanent safety.
The investigator had recovered deleted footage from the smart doorbell I had installed at our home.
I sat in the dark, watching a time-lapse of the last three months while I was out of state.
Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, a sleek black Mercedes would pull into my driveway.
A tall man in a tailored suit would step out, bypass the security system with a code Claire clearly gave him, and walk inside.
He would leave hours later, always just before dawn.
I zoomed in on the license plate and ran it through the corporate database.
The vehicle was registered to Marcus Thorne, the aggressive, ruthless CEO of Thorne Logistics.
Thorne was my absolute biggest corporate rival, a man who had been trying to bankrupt Whitaker Construction for years.
Claire hadn't just cheated on me; she had slept with the one man actively trying to destroy my empire.
The child she was carrying wasn't a mistake—it was a calculated insurance policy orchestrated by Thorne.
Suddenly, the door to the office creaked open, and Sophie stood there rubbing her eyes, holding an old iPad.
"Dad," she mumbled, walking over to my desk. "I was trying to play games on this old tablet Claire left in my backpack."
She set the iPad down on the mahogany wood, looking confused.
"It keeps getting these weird text messages from someone named 'M.T.' talking about corporate shares."
I snatched the tablet, realizing Claire’s iCloud account was still synced to this forgotten device.
I scrolled through months of encrypted messages, my blood turning colder with every word I read.
Thorne hadn't just been sleeping with her; he had been feeding her instructions.
He had promised to marry her and combine their wealth if she could secure a fifty-percent stake in Whitaker Construction during our divorce.
She had purposely manipulated the Christmas Eve fight to force the divorce papers on me, thinking her pregnancy claim would trap my assets.
Thorne was using my wife as a trojan horse to execute a hostile corporate takeover.
I heard the heavy, ominous ping of a new email arriving in my primary corporate inbox.
I clicked it open, seeing an official legal summons from Thorne Logistics.
May you like
Thorne had officially filed a motion to freeze all Whitaker Construction assets, citing a dispute over spousal equity.
He was coming for everything I had built.
