Chapter 3 - The Vault of Secrets
Chadworth could no longer watch from a distance. The cold glass of the monitors felt like prison walls. He stood up so abruptly that his heavy leather chair crashed backward against the reinforced concrete wall of the vault.
"Get the master key," Chadworth ordered his security chief, his voice dropping into a dangerous, glacial register that made the veteran operative flinch. "Open the auxiliary archive."
"Sir? The archive is sealed. It contains the personal background files on—"
"Open it," Chadworth repeated, his eyes fixed on the screen where Sabina was now storming out of the sunroom, leaving Rosamund kneeling on the floor to help Lorelai retrieve her scattered pencils.
The security chief didn't argue further. He keyed a complex biometric override into the terminal beside the main monitors, unlocking a secondary digital vault that held private investigative dossiers. Chadworth had commissioned background checks on every major executive and associate in his firm, but he had never thought to run a comprehensive, deep-tier forensic audit on the woman he was set to marry in less than a month.
The files began cascading across the third screen: corporate filings, shell companies, legal name changes, and old police reports from three different states.
The documents painted a horrifying portrait of financial predation. Sabina was not a wealthy socialite or an independent consultant; she was the surviving partner of a high-end matrimonial extortion ring. Her previous three fiancés—all wealthy, aging industrialists—had suffered sudden, catastrophic financial ruin followed by mysterious domestic tragedies or sudden cognitive declines. In every single case, the man’s children had been systematically alienated, institutionalized, or sent away to boarding schools under fabricated pretexts, leaving Sabina as the sole beneficiary of their multi-million-dollar estates.
Worse still, the investigation revealed that Sabina’s campaign against Rosamund was not born out of genuine suspicion, but out of calculated necessity. Rosamund had intercepted three separate financial documents over the past month—tax documents Sabina had attempted to forge under Chadworth’s signature, transferring offshore titles into her personal holdings. Rosamund had not been stealing from the family; she had been quietly compiling evidence to protect the girls and alert Chadworth before the wedding date locked down his assets permanently.
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"My God," Chadworth whispered, staring at a bank routing number that matched a Swiss account he had never authorized. "She wasn't protecting me. She was gutting the empire from the inside out."
On the main monitor, the scene in the sunroom had shifted. Rosamund had managed to coax a small smile from Gemma, handing her the plush rabbit before standing up to face the hallway where Sabina’s footsteps were returning.
