They left. Ryan closed the door behind them and leaned against it. “That was brutal.”
“That was necessary.”
He was quiet for a moment. “You know they’re not going to stop, right? Ethan’s desperate. Desperate men do stupid things.”
“Let him.”
—
Stupid things happened three nights later.
Ethan called Ryan at midnight. His voice was slurred, panicked. “Ryan, I need your help. Stella took everything. The company accounts—they’re empty. All of it. Forty million dollars. She drugged me and transferred everything.”
Ryan put him on speaker. I listened from my hotel suite, still dressed in my work clothes.
“Ethan, call the police.”
“I can’t. If I call the police, the board will find out. The company will collapse before morning. Please—you have to help me find her. She’s trying to leave the country.”
Ryan looked at me. I nodded.
“Stay where you are,” Ryan said. “I’ll make some calls.”
He hung up. “Are you really going to help him?”
“I’m not helping him.” I picked up my phone. “I’m helping his parents. They never treated me like a servant. They treated me like a daughter. And I won’t let Stella Bao destroy their retirement.”
I made three calls. The first was to airport security. The second was to the Vidia police department’s financial crimes unit. The third was to my father’s Chief of Staff.
“Find Stella Bao. Freeze every account she touches. And don’t let her leave the country.”
“Yes, Ms. Wen.”
—
They found her at the airport at 4 AM. She was wearing a wig and sunglasses, holding a first-class ticket to Zurich. The police took her into custody before she reached the gate.
The money was still in her personal account. All forty million dollars. She hadn’t had time to move it.
Ryan called Ethan with the news. He cried on the phone—actually cried—while Ryan stood in my hotel suite, holding the phone away from his ear like it was a grenade.
“He wants to thank you,” Ryan said. “In person.”
“No.”
“He’s on his knees, Aurora. Metaphorically. For now.”
I looked out the window at Vidia’s glittering skyline. Somewhere down there, in a mansion I used to call home, Ethan Key was learning what it meant to lose everything.
“Tell him,” I said slowly, “that if he wants to thank me, he can come to my office tomorrow at nine AM. And he can bring his divorce papers.”
“His divorce papers? He’s not divorced from Stella.”
“Not yet. But he will be.”
—
Ethan arrived at nine AM sharp. He wore a suit I’d ironed a hundred times. His tie was crooked.
I didn’t fix it.
