Chapter 12 - The Last Box from the Thirty-Second Floor
By ten o'clock, I was back on the thirty-second floor, standing inside the corner office that Sienna had spent the last three years coveting. The movers had already cleared out her personal effects—the framed certificates, the gold-plated desk accessories, the monogrammed leather blotter—leaving behind an empty, hollow shell of a room that smelled faintly of expensive perfume and sudden ruin.
My own office was three doors down, a modest space overlooking the Monongahela River. It took me less than twenty minutes to pack my personal belongings. There weren't many: a leather-bound journal containing years of private market research, a heavy glass paperweight given to me by my father, and a framed black-and-white photograph of the old family estate in Maine.
As I slid the photograph into my briefcase, the office door clicked open. I didn't need to turn around to know who was standing on the threshold.
“You left my name off the asset freeze,” a voice whispered. It was thin, cracked, and completely devoid of the sharp, authoritative cadence that Sienna had used to command boardrooms just twelve hours ago.
I turned slowly. Sienna stood in the doorway, wearing the same emerald evening gown she had worn to the promotion dinner, though now the fabric was rumpled, stained near the hem with damp pavement water, and utterly devoid of glamour. Her hair fell across her face in limp strands, and her eyes were ringed with dark, bruised circles of exhaustion and terror.
“I didn't leave your name off anything, Sienna,” I said calmly, zipping my briefcase closed. “The federal investigators and the corporate legal division determined which accounts were linked to the shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. If your name is on them, it’s because you signed the wire transfers.”
“You knew,” she breathed, taking a stumbling step into the office, her heels clicking unevenly against the hardwood floor. “You knew about the BVI accounts for months. You watched me climb. You watched me plan every single presentation, every meeting with Andre… and you just let me keep digging.”
“I gave you enough rope,” I repeated the words I had used in the hotel suite, my voice level and cold. “You tied the knots yourself. Every time you told me you were working late at the office while you were actually meeting Andre at the private rental in Shadyside, I had the receipts waiting in a digital folder. Every time you belittled me in front of your colleagues to prove how dominant you were, I was locking down the secondary trust.”
Sienna stared at me, her chest heaving as the full magnitude of her helplessness washed over her. The woman who had treated me like a decorative fixture at her table, who had believed herself untouchable because she wore an executive title and slept with a regional managing director, finally understood that she had been playing a game she was never equipped to win.
“They’re talking about ten years, Reid,” she sobbed, her knees buckling slightly as she leaned against the doorframe for support. “The federal prosecutor… they’re calling it institutional wire fraud and conspiracy. Andre is trying to pin the entire setup on me. He’s telling the investigators that I forged his signature on the subsidiary documents.”
“Let them fight over who gets the larger cell,” I said, picking up my briefcase and walking past her toward the door. “It has nothing to do with me anymore.”
She reached out, her trembling fingers catching the sleeve of my charcoal coat. “Reid… please. We were married. We shared a home. Can’t you just… use your connections? Call the district attorney? Tell them it was a misunderstanding?”
I stopped, looked down at her fingers gripping my sleeve, and then raised my eyes to meet hers. There was no anger in my gaze. There was only absolute, freezing indifference.
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“Sienna,” I said softly, “when I walked into Room 808 last night, I didn't come to save our marriage. I came to close an account that had been operating in the red for seven years.”
I gently pulled my arm free from her grasp, stepped past her into the hallway, and walked toward the elevators without looking back once.
