He shrugs. “Wouldn't know.”
I stand straighter, tapping my chin. “In the two years we were married, you hit me twice.”
He scoffs. “I never hityou. You're remembering it wrong, Eloise. You always had your head up your ass or in the clouds. You probably imagined it.”
“Gaslighting,” I mumble, looking down at my toes. “I know it well, and I'm not buying it anymore. Here's what really happened. The first time you hit me was when I saw you signing a check to pay an invoice issued to Gold Weaver, Inc. You were signing someone else's name. I don't remember a lot about that night because you almost broke my jaw?—”
Damien’s growl makes my arms break out in gooseflesh. His hand closes around Tony's throat.
“Damien!”
His voice is pure monster as he says, “I won't break his neck. Just hurt him, the same as he hurt you.”
“I need him to be able to talk.” I spread my hands, pleading with him to back off.
His grip eases, and Tony takes a deep breath.
“I tracked down Gold Weaver's warehouse, Tony. And guess what we found there? Paper scraps and a man who said he worked for Gold Weaver printing this magazine.” I wave Echo Mills Today again.
Tony grits his teeth. “Whatever you think you saw, it's got nothing to do with me.”
I have to hand it to him. He almost sounds sincere. “I questioned whether there could be another explanation when I found nothing in that warehouse and couldn't link Gold Weaver back to you, until I recalled the second time you hit me. Do you remember?”
He shakes his head. “Never happened.”
“It was the last time I slept under this roof. You caught me rummaging in your office safe. You'd left it unlocked, a mistake I have a feeling you regret. I slipped in and took astack of bills. You didn't know that, though. I shoved them down my pants before you came back into the office. God knows you hadn't been interested in anything in my pants in a long time. You were much more turned on by controlling me.”
“You took money from my safe?” His voice holds all the venom I expected.
“Oh yes. I stole thousands from you before I moved out. Had to provide for myself while I got back on my feet. Thanks for that.”
Tony lunges for me. But Damien catches him by the shoulder and lifts his feet off the floor. His hand swipes harmlessly six inches from my face. “You fucking bitch.”
I pull one of the hundreds from my bag and hold it up. “Weirdest thing. I always thought you kept a lot of cash around because you were sheltering it from the IRS. But then I tried to buy something with one of these hundreds, and the cashier had a strange reaction. I still didn't get it until another store owner told me what to look for.” I brush my red curls from my eyes. “This bill is a very good, extremely sophisticated counterfeit, Tony. I bet that if I wasn't an artist myself, I would have missed the slight variation in color and the smudge in the scrollwork in the upper right corner. But I am an artist, and thisisa counterfeit. It only took a second for me to figure out that the pattern of red and blue fibers in the material this bill is printed on matches the pattern in the pages of Echo Mills Today magazine.”
Tony lowers his chin and bares his teeth but says nothing. I can almost hear the bones of his shoulder crunch under Damien’s grip.
“Now, from there, it took me a little longer to put it all together. I asked myself,what would Tony do? Why would a man who'd built his career focusing on the bottom line print a free magazine? I thought at least you were making money off the ads. But I checked, and you're not. They're all phony. But once I saw the paper matched the counterfeit bill, it all came together. You use Echo Mills Today as a cover to bring in reams of paper specially crafted for printing money. You print the magazine, but you also print cash. Gold Weaver claims to have earned the money on the ads, but of course, that's all falsified. No one pays for the ads. But it justifies the income. Gold Weaver deposits the cash in a bank in the Cayman Islands, into an account owned by a second shell corporation called Genesis. Genesis wires it back to you in the form of business consulting fees, completely laundered. Oh, I'm not exactly sure how you get the printed cash to the Caymans, but I bet the FBI could figure it out.”
“What do you want, Eloise?” Tony grits out.
“What do I want to keep my mouth shut?”
He nods twice, slowly, and I’m relieved. Truth is, everything I've said has been theory and speculation. I don’t know for sure how he’s doing everything, only how I think he's doing it. But I’m right. He just confirmed I’m right. I have him.
“I want Harcourt Manor,” I say. “Call off your lawyers. Sign an affidavit that you have no claim to my home, and everything here will remain our little secret.”
Tony sneers. “That's it? You're not going to try to get your hands on my fortune?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I take a step closer to him and look straight in his heartless, unfeeling eyes. “Because I never wanted the money or to hurt you. You came into my life during a painful time,and I'm not sure I would have survived those years without you.”
“And don't you forget it,” he mumbles under his breath. His voice is as harsh as ever, but his expression softens a little.
“What you do with your money is your business. But Harcourt Manor is mine, and it's going to stay that way.”
