Chapter 257
She gripped the steering wheel as she drove, her left hand doing most of the work while her braced right wrist protested with a dull ache. She navigated the late-night traffic with the cold precision of a race car driver, her focus absolute. She had known her mother’s health was fragile — but she hadn’t realized how close to the edge Grayson’s relentless pressure had pushed her. Her mother, Ellyn, was the only pillar she had left. If she lost her, the Carson family was truly dead.
Isolde sprinted through the sliding glass doors of the Lenox Hill emergency room. The smell of bleach and antiseptic hit her like a physical blow.
She found Saul slumped in a plastic chair in the waiting area. He looked as though he had aged ten years in a single night — his suit wrinkled, his face covered in gray stubble. Isolde dropped to her knees in front of him.
“Uncle Saul! Where is she?”
Saul slowly lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot. “They are giving her a blood transfusion. The bleeding stopped, but she isn’t out of the woods.”
Isolde let out a shaky breath and leaned back on her heels. “What happened? I looked at the quarterly reports last week. I knew we were on the brink, but I thought we had another month.”
Saul let out a bitter, hollow laugh. “Those reports were doctored, Isolde. We faked them to keep the board from panicking. Carson Dynamics is completely empty. We are a shell.”
Isolde stared at him, her mind racing. “How is that possible? We had two massive government sub-contracts signed for the fall.”
“They pulled out,” Saul whispered, rubbing his face. “Both of them. They took their business to InnoTech.”
Isolde frowned. “InnoTech? Belle’s company? They don’t have the manufacturing capability to handle those orders. How did they steal our clients?”
Saul looked at her, his eyes full of a terrible, crushing guilt. “Because they underbid us by exactly five percent. And they offered a product with our exact technical specifications.”
𝗗𝗈𝘄ոl𝘰𝗮𝖽 рD𝖥𝗌 𝘧𝗿е𝗲 о𝘯 𝘨𝘢𝗅𝗻𝗈𝗏еls.𝘤𝗼𝘮
Isolde’s blood ran cold. “Someone leaked our internal data? We need to call the FBI.”
“It wasn’t an employee,” Saul said, looking away, unable to meet her eyes. “They got the data during the investor due diligence phase.”
Isolde’s brain stopped.
The only external investor Carson Dynamics had entertained in the last year was Grayson’s private equity fund.
“Are you telling me,” Isolde said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, vibrating whisper, “that Grayson took our confidential data… and handed it to Belle?”
Saul nodded slowly. “He demanded full access to our R&D pipeline before he signed the term sheet. A month later, InnoTech launched their new line. It was a slaughter.”
The room spun.
Isolde pressed her hands flat against the cold tile floor to steady herself.
This wasn’t just business. This was an execution. Grayson had used his marriage to her as a Trojan horse to gut her family’s legacy and feed it to his mistress.
“And that’s not all,” Saul added, his voice hollow. “The clients told me Grayson personally called them. He told them Carson Dynamics was going bankrupt. He told them to jump ship.”
Isolde curled her fingers inward. Her fingernails dug so deeply into her palms that the skin broke. A thin line of warm blood seeped into the creases of her hand. She didn’t feel the pain. She felt only a pure, absolute hatred.
.