Chapter 6 - The Poisoned Alliance
Ruin makes predators turn on each other with a speed that love could never match.
By six o’clock that evening, the storm had made landfall across southern Maine, lashing Crestwick with sixty-mile-an-hour gale-force winds. Inside the downtown offices of Kerr Creative Partners—a converted brick loft overlooking the docks—the glass was vibrating in the window frames.
Mina Kerr was frantically stuffing designer clothes, personal hard drives, and legal files into leather luggage.
Her phone had been ringing continuously for three hours. Two national retail clients had already terminated their representation contracts via email following the scene at the Yacht Club. A reporter from the *Portland Press Herald* was parked outside on the street. And ten minutes ago, her bank had notified her that Stonecroft’s last three retainer checks had bounced due to frozen corporate accounts.
The door to her office slammed open so hard the frosted glass cracked.
Whit stumbled inside. He looked like a man who had survived a shipwreck. His coat was soaked through, his eyes were bloodshot, and the manic energy that had driven him for years had curdled into sheer panic.
“Where is the offshore reserve?” Whit demanded, marching across the hardwood floor toward Mina’s desk.
Mina stopped packing and glared at him with venomous hatred. “Get out of my office, Whit.”
“Where is the money, Mina?” Whit roared, slamming both hands down on her desk, scattering marketing mockups across the floor. “The Cayman account! There was six hundred thousand left from the bridge loan before Sadie froze the domestic lines! I need the digital key!”
“There is no key, you idiot!” Mina yelled back, her voice shrill with hysteria. “That money was transferred to satisfy my agency’s advance overhead two weeks ago! It’s gone! Spent!”
Whit stared at her, his jaw slacking in horror. “You spent six hundred thousand dollars in fourteen days?”
“I had operational costs! I had vendors to pay! You told me the eight million from the Lamont Trust was guaranteed!” Mina screamed, throwing a stack of files directly into his chest. “You swore she was under your thumb! You told me she was a sentimental, sheltered trust-fund girl who would sign whatever you put in front of her! You said she loved you too much to ever look at the books!”
“She did love me!” Whit shouted, grabbing his hair with both hands. “She was supposed to sign it! I had the whole board lined up! I had the planning commission in my pocket!”
“Well, your ‘sentimental girl’ just handed the state attorney general our entire email archive!” Mina shrieked, tears of rage cutting black tracks through her mascara. “My license is being reviewed! The bank froze my corporate credit lines an hour ago! The Cartier store is demanding the return of the ring because your credit card payment was charged back as fraud!”
Whit staggered back against the wall, his breathing ragged. “We can fight it. We can hire a crisis firm in Boston. We can claim Sadie had a breakdown—that she fabricated the audio—”
“Fabricated the audio?” Mina laughed, a harsh, ugly sound that tore out of her throat. “She has forty-seven minutes of us talking in the spa, Whit! She has your voice explaining how you were going to use Oldgate’s deed to bleed her family dry! No lawyer in New England will touch this without a million-dollar cash retainer!”
Mina zipped her suitcase with a violent yank.
“I’m driving to Montreal tonight,” she said coldly, pulling on a black wool coat. “My sister has an apartment there. I’m taking whatever cash I have left before the federal marshals freeze my personal accounts.”
“You can’t leave me here!” Whit lunged forward, grabbing the handle of her suitcase. “Stonecroft’s debt is in my name, but the shell company routing was your idea! You set up the Cayman accounts! If I go down, Mina, I swear to God I will drag you down to the bottom with me!”
Mina turned on him with a look of pure, unadulterated disgust.
“You don’t have the leverage to drag anyone anywhere, Whit,” she spat, wrenching the suitcase from his grip. “Sadie was right about one thing. You were never a developer. You were just a handsome parasite living off her grandmother’s name. And now that she’s pulled the host away, there’s nothing left of you.”
She pushed past him, her heels clicking rapidly down the hall.
May you like
The heavy exterior door slammed shut behind her, leaving Whit Noel standing alone in the dark, empty office while the Atlantic wind howled against the rattling glass.
***
