Page 82 of Married to the Devil

“Mommy, apples?”

“Sorry, baby, I’ll get them in a bit.” I sit down at the table. “Mind if I join you?”

“By all means.” Priya smiles kindly. “Everything okay?”

“Totally fine. Just in the mood to draw a picture.”

Hattie nods seriously. “Unicorns,” she says, pointing at the crayons. “Lots of unicorns.”

25

RAFE

For the first time since I hired her straight out of law school, Theodora looks rattled. She paces in front of my desk, a sheaf of papers tucked under her arm. “It was all right there. For years, he barely tried to hide it.”

I wait patiently for her to get to the point. “What did you find?”

“I trusted him. That was the problem. I knew better, and I did it anyway.”

“We all trusted him.”

“But it’s my fault.” She stops walking and slams the pages down on her chair. She lets out a frustrated laugh. “I worked with him all the time, you know? He’s your family’s accountant. We’d go over numbers together and I never bothered to check anything.”

“Why would you? Ignazio’s been controlling the Corvino books for decades.”

“That’s just it. That’s exactly what I should have been wary of. Someone with that much access, where they’re the single choke point, they always go off the rails. It’s classic.”

“I understand you’re upset, but I’m starting to wonder what set you off.”

“It’s the numbers.” She flips through the papers until she finds what she’s looking for. “They’re wrong.”

I wait for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t. Instead, she shows me a spreadsheet, meticulously typed and highlighted. I follow the colors and she walks me through it, explaining how one column doesn’t add up to the other.

“Money’s missing.”

“I traced the amounts. Payments have been leaving Corvino accounts secretly for the past six years. Never the same number and never from the same location, but they always ended up in the same place.”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell that yet. It’s some corporate dummy shell. But the point is, Ignazio was paying someone.” She sits heavily and leans back with a groan. “And I missed it from the start.”

The implication settles slowly.

I knew Ignazio wasn’t alone. Clearly, he’s got parts of my organization under his thumb. I’m still trying to work out who’s loyal and who isn’t, but that’ll come in time.

What bothers me is the timeline.

Six years. That’s a long stretch to plan a coup.

“It’s possible he was embezzling the money to himself,” I offer as an explanation.

She concedes with a weary wave of her hand. “There’s no way to say for sure.”

“But what if he wasn’t?” I sit with the question a moment as dread builds in my gut. “What if he’s been paying someone for six years?”

“What would he be paying them for?”

“Loyalty.”