Chapter 1 The Perfect Life

Brooke

“Put the champagne down.”

I kept smiling for the photographer while Cullen removed the glass from my hand. He did it smoothly, almost affectionately, his fingers brushing mine before he passed it to a waiter moving behind us. Anyone watching would see a considerate fiancé making sure I didn’t have to hold a drink while posing for another picture.

I saw the slight tightening of his jaw.

“I was still drinking that.”

“You’ve had enough.”

“I’ve had one glass.”

“And we have another hour of photographs.”

The camera flashed before I could answer, and Cullen’s hand settled at my waist, pulling me closer. “Smile, Brooke.”

So I did. Apparently being engaged required stronger facial muscles than running a technology company.

The photographer lowered his camera and waved another group toward us. Cullen’s parents this time, followed by mine, all four looking entirely too pleased beneath an archway containing several thousand white roses. My mother had told me exactly how much the flowers cost. I had asked her not to. She had mistaken that for a request to tell me twice.

“Brooke, straighten your shoulders,” she murmured as she took her place beside me.

My father looked me over. “Where’s your champagne?”

“Confiscated.”

Cullen laughed, and everyone else joined him, because Cullen Ardner was charming. That was practically his secondary occupation.

His primary one was being heir to Ardner Global Holdings, although judging by the guest list tonight, marrying me might have ranked slightly higher. Four hundred and twelve people had filled the Mitchell estate for our engagement celebration. Senators, judges, executives, investors, people whose names appeared on buildings and people wealthy enough to have buildings named after them but tasteful enough not to.

It was the sort of room my father considered important and the sort of life everyone had spent twenty-seven years telling me I was fortunate to have.

“Beautiful,” the photographer announced.

My father checked his watch. “Brooke, Senator Whitmore is waiting to speak with you.”

“I already spoke with him.”

“You said hello.”

“That is generally how conversations begin.”

His expression warned me not to push, and Cullen’s fingers tightened around my waist.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll go together.”

I looked at his hand, then at my father. There it was again, that strange sensation I’d been having lately, as though my life were a meeting everyone else had attended before I arrived.

“I need the restroom.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“I think I can locate it. I grew up here.”

Cullen stared at me for half a second too long before his public smile returned. “Don’t disappear on me.”

Something about the way he said it made my skin prickle. I kissed his cheek because four hundred people were watching and escaped before anyone found another politician I desperately needed to impress.

The noise faded as I moved deeper into the house. I passed the downstairs powder room deliberately. Five minutes was all I wanted. Five minutes where nobody corrected my posture, chose my conversation, monitored my alcohol, or reminded me how lucky I was to be marrying Cullen Ardner.

My father’s office door was open, and I slowed. That was odd. Dad treated his office like a diplomatic vault whenever we had guests. The door stayed locked, and even the cleaning staff weren’t allowed inside without his assistant present.

“Dad?”

No answer.

I stepped inside. His desk lamp illuminated an open folder, so I crossed to the desk. I would have ignored it if I hadn’t seen my company’s name printed across the top page.

MITCHELL SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTION ROUTING

Mitchell Systems was mine. Not technically entirely mine anymore, thanks to investors and a board of directors, but I had built the original architecture myself at twenty-two, when my office had been the corner of my apartment closest to the router.

Why did my father have internal routing reports?

The first page contained international transfers. Nothing immediately alarming, until I noticed the transaction identifiers. Those weren’t standard client transfers. They were moving through our private routing architecture.

“That’s impossible.”

One destination account belonged to a corporation I didn’t recognize, yet the transaction had bypassed two fraud-review thresholds and an automated hold I had personally helped design. That couldn’t happen accidentally.

I flipped the page and found another transfer with the same bypass, then another. Someone had created a path through Mitchell Systems that our compliance department couldn’t see.

My phone buzzed inside my clutch.

Cullen: Where are you?

I ignored it and traced the next transactions with my finger. One receiving company led to Ardner Global, while another trail moved through three corporations before disappearing into an offshore account.

Then I noticed the names.

They weren’t account holders. They were women, each listed beside a date. The first meant nothing to me, but the second tugged at my memory. I had seen her name somewhere.

I pulled out my phone and searched it.

LOCAL WOMAN STILL MISSING AFTER EIGHTEEN MONTHS

My stomach tightened. I searched another name and found another missing-person case. By the time the third produced the same result, my pulse was hammering in my throat.

“What the hell?”

I turned the page. The financial records gave way to transportation invoices, hotel reservations, private aircraft manifests, and coded payments linked to the same accounts. The language stayed vague until I found a notation buried halfway down the page that my brain refused to understand.

Human asset procurement and international transfer.

Cold spread through me as I read it again, then searched the next page faster. The Ardner name appeared again, but so did Mitchell Systems. Our technology hadn’t merely processed the money. Someone had deliberately used my company to hide it.

My phone buzzed again.

Cullen: Brooke. Answer me.

I barely saw it. At the bottom of the document were two authorization signatures, one belonging to an Ardner executive and the other to my father.

I knew every aggressive slash of Richard Mitchell’s signature. I had spent half my life watching him put it on documents he expected me to obey, and now it sat beneath records that should never have existed.

My father knew. Maybe worse than knew.

My phone vibrated again, but this time the number was unknown.

If you want to know who your father truly was, do not trust anyone tonight.

The wording caught harder than the warning. Whoever sent it had written was, not is, and suddenly the room felt too quiet.

A swell of applause erupted from the ballroom, followed by laughter and music. Twenty yards away, more than four hundred people were drinking champagne beneath crystal chandeliers, celebrating my future with Cullen Ardner while I stood over documents tying his family, my company, and my father to something horrifying.

His family was out there. So was my father, surrounded by politicians, executives, friends, business partners, and people who had hugged me tonight while telling me how perfect my life was.

I slowly folded the document back into place and wondered how many of them knew exactly what my perfect life had been built on.