Page 138 of Cruel Lies

He locked me out of everything. The dashboard, the admin portal, the bank, the corporate filings, the data infrastructure. Every login I have throws backAuthentication failedorAccess revokedorHaha, you wish.They were thorough. Whoever did it—Navi, probably, or some faceless person on Ronan's payroll—they went down my whole list and snatched it all up good.

But there's one more item that isn't on any list.

When I first built the fraud engine, back before it had a name, before Emmett Glover ever blocked off twenty minutes for it, I spun up a founder's dev instance on a server I've been paying eleven dollars a month for out of a personal card. It's where Ibroke things on purpose, testing ugly early versions before they were fit to show anyone.

It's not connected to the company's official infrastructure. Therefore, it's not in any of the formation documents, not attached to the LLC or the bank or anything Todd ever put his greedy little name on.

It's mine. Just mine.

Which means not one of Ronan's thieving little minions could've possibly known they left it behind.

I log in.

Welcome back, Calista.

I could weep tears of joy at those three little words, same as I've wept tears of joy at Ronan's four-word reminders every morning for the last few weeks. I don't, because I'm all out of tears I'm willing to spend on him.

But I could.

Just like I'd hoped, the engine's here. It's an older version, sure, but it works. It can still reach out and pull public records, court dockets, corporate filings, the same open data streams I've always fed it.

They took my house. They didn't take my hands.

Receipts are incoming. Round two.

I crack my knuckles and I start.

The first thing I go after is the filing. Weeks ago, Ronan looked at me over a table at the Woozy Tiger and blamed it on Todd. Time to see if that was really the truth.

I feed the engine what I have—the entity that filed it, the case number, the shell name buried in the paperwork.

Then I let it digest.

As I watch it work, the shell that filed against me unspools into another shell. That one leads into another. Three layers of Delaware entities, each one owning a piece of the last, each one a blank corporate face with a registered agent and no human name attached. My engine stalks the path patiently, one hop at a time, because that's what I built it to do.

And at the bottom, at the very bottom of the stack, is a client entity…

… of The Akov Firm.

I sit back.

So the filing that Ronan told me was Todd came from Ronan. It was his all along. The fire he rushed to put out was a fireheset himself.

But it gets worse. It always gets worse.

I pull the docket for that motion, the one he "defeated," the one he told me at the aquarium was handled, wouldn't survive the hearing on the twelfth. And there it is, right in the record.

The motion wasn't beaten—it was withdrawn. Byconsent. Meaning both sides agreed to drop it. And then, within forty-eight hours, a second shell refiled almost the exact same thing.

I read it twice to be sure I'm not imagining it.

But no. I'm not. It's very, very real.

The whole thing was bullshit theater. He came to me looking like the only man who could save me, then he "fought it off" by simply agreeing—withhimself—to withdraw it, and then he quietly refiled through a different route so the acquisition kept building steam in the background while I sat across from him, thanking God he was on my side.

He wasn't.

Well, he kind of was.