Chapter 189

Chapter 189:

A sleek black sedan pulled up beside her. The window rolled down.

Arland looked out. His face was a mask of controlled fury.

“Get in,” he said.

Isolde opened the door and sank into the backseat. It was dry. It was safe. Arland handed her a towel without a word. He didn’t ask what had happened. He had seen the Bentley speed off.

“Where to?” Arland asked.

Isolde wiped the rain from her eyes. The mascara ran down her cheeks, but her gaze was clear. Hard.

“Home,” she said. “But first — Arland, I need you to pull the financial records for Lancaster Holdings.”

“Why?”

𝖥𝗶𝘯𝗱 nоve𝗹 𝘗𝘋𝗙ѕ 𝗈𝗇 𝘨а𝗅n𝘰v𝗲𝗅𝘀.c𝘰𝘮

“Because he just chose a server crash over a dying wish,” Isolde said. “I want to know exactly how much that server cost him.”

The interior of Arland’s car was a quiet haven compared to the chaos outside. Isolde dabbed her face with the towel, her hands trembling slightly — not from cold, but from rage.

Arland handed her a tablet. “I anticipated this. I’ve been tracking his liquidity since the retreat.”

Isolde took the device. Her eyes moved across the spreadsheets — columns of numbers, transfers, assets.

Her finger stopped on a single line item.

“Two hundred million?” she whispered. “He put two hundred million dollars into InnoTech?”

“Direct injection,” Arland confirmed, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “And look at the date. Yesterday.”

Isolde scrolled down. “This isn’t just an investment. This is a bailout. InnoTech is bleeding cash. Why would he do this?”

“Because Belle wants a seat at the table,” Arland said. “Professor Nelson’s new consortium requires a massive capital buy-in for partners. Grayson is buying her a ticket.”

A laugh bubbled up in Isolde’s throat — dark and dangerous. “He’s buying her a career. With family money.”

She swiped to the next tab. Her breath hitched.

“He’s leveraging his position at the bank.” The realization landed harder than the rain had. “He’s triggered a risk assessment on Carson Dynamics.”

“He’s not just triggering it,” Arland corrected. “He’s actively feeding the auditors biased data. He’s squeezing your supply chain, flagging your accounts. He wants to freeze your credit lines so Ellyn has to come crawling to him for money.”

Isolde stared at the screen. The man she had married wasn’t merely indifferent. He was actively working to destroy her lineage while propping up his mistress.

“That call,” Isolde said, her mind turning rapidly. “Belle said the drive unit was smoking. The server crashed.”

“I saw the specs they released,” Arland said. “They’re using a cooling architecture we discarded five years ago. It can’t handle the load. It will overheat every single time.”

Isolde looked out the window. The rain blurred the city lights into long, trembling streaks.

“He’s pouring millions into a sinking ship,” she murmured. “He thinks he’s saving her. But he’s only feeding a fire.”

“We can expose it,” Arland said. “I can release the comparison data — show that InnoTech is running obsolete technology. It would kill their stock price by morning.”

Isolde shook her head slowly. “No.”

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