“Sir, your wife was in a serious car acc:ident an hour ago.” My heart stopped. “No, that’s impossible—she’s upstairs asleep.” The officer frowned, and I led him to our bedroom. His hand went to his side.
“Sir,” he whispered, “please step back. That’s not who you think it is.”
Marco Christian stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his corner office, the Seattle skyline shimmering through a curtain of afternoon rain. At forty-two, he commanded respect and fear in equal measure.
His steel-gray eyes, the color of a winter sky, had witnessed countless business deals where he’d crushed competitors without so much as a flinch. Marco Christian didn’t just win; he obliterated. “Sir, your wife called about dinner tonight,” his secretary’s voice announced through the intercom, crisp and impersonal.
Marco’s jaw tightened, an almost imperceptible clenching of muscle. Jenny. His wife of sixteen years and the mother of their fourteen-year-old daughter, Casey.
The woman who had once looked at him with an adoration that felt like sunshine now scheduled dinners with him like a business appointment. He’d built Christian Industries from the rubble of his childhood after his father abandoned them when he was twelve. While other kids played video games, Marco studied, worked, and planned.
By twenty-five, he owned three successful tech startups. By thirty-five, he’d married Jenny Neil, a stunning brunette from a middle-class family who seemed suitably impressed by his meteoric rise. The early years had been good.
Jenny had been a supportive partner, a warm presence against the cold backdrop of his ambition. They’d had Casey, bought the sprawling mansion in Bellevue, and meticulously assembled the facade of the American dream. But success bred complacency, and in the fertile soil of complacency, betrayal had taken root.
His phone buzzed. A text from his business partner, Wesley Stratton. Emergency meeting tomorrow.
Need to discuss the Henderson contract. Wesley. Six feet tall, with a charming smile that could disarm a hostile board meeting.
Marco had met him five years ago, his consulting firm circling the drain. Seeing a spark of potential, Marco had bailed him out, making him a partner and giving him a forty percent stake in the expanded business. He’d given the man a kingdom.
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