“Grace.” Nathaniel’s voice was dangerously low, carrying a quiet authority that demanded absolute truth. “What is happening in my house?”
Grace tried to stand, but her knees had locked from hours of kneeling on the freezing marble. She gripped the edge of the gold-legged table, her knuckles white, but her legs gave out. She braced for the hard impact of the floor, but it never came.
Nathaniel had crossed the expansive foyer in three long strides. He caught her by the elbow, his strong hands steadying her. As he did, his gaze dropped to her hands. The deep, agonizing fissures around her fingernails were bleeding, turning the soapy water in the bucket a sickly shade of crimson.
Victoria rushed forward, her silk robe fluttering. “Nathaniel, darling, it’s a misunderstanding. She made a terrible mess earlier, and I merely asked her to clean it before you returned. You know how much you value order.”
Nathaniel didn’t even blink in Victoria’s direction. He kept his eyes fixed on Grace’s trembling form. “You asked her to scrub a spotless floor at nearly five in the morning until she bled?”
“She is an employee, Nathaniel,” Victoria said, her tone hardening just a fraction, a hint of her usual entitlement bleeding through her panic. “She needs to learn her place. She was snooping in my private quarters.”
“Your private quarters?” Nathaniel finally turned to look at his fiancée. The exhaustion in his eyes was instantly replaced by a storm of cold fury. “This is my house, Victoria. Every room in it belongs to me. And if you ever lay a hand on or psychologically torture another human being under my roof again, you won’t just be leaving this house, you’ll be leaving this state.”
Victoria took a step back, her porcelain mask cracking. “You’re taking the word of a common maid over your future wife?”
“I am looking at a bucket of blood,” Nathaniel stated, his voice dropping to a whisper that echoed louder than a shout in the cavernous hall. “Pack your bags, Victoria. You’re going to a hotel tonight. We will discuss the future of our engagement tomorrow.”
“Nathaniel—”
“Now!”
The sheer force of his command made Victoria flinch. She shot one last venomous, hate-filled glare at Grace before turning on her heel and storming up the sweeping staircase.
Nathaniel turned back to Grace, his expression softening entirely. “Let’s get you to the kitchen, Grace. We need to take care of those hands.”
The stainless-steel kitchen was warm, the heavy mahogany doors shutting out the bitter chill of the foyer. Nathaniel sat Grace at the granite island and retrieved a first-aid kit from the pantry. With surprising gentleness for a man of his stature, he began cleaning the cracked, bleeding skin around her fingernails with an antiseptic wipe.
“Tell me the truth, Grace,” he said softly, not looking up from her hands. “What did you see? Victoria doesn’t punish people out of mere boredom. She does it out of fear. What were you ‘snooping’ for?”
Grace hesitated. She was terrified of losing her job, the only thing keeping a roof over her and her twelve-year-old son Noah’s heads. But looking at the genuine concern in Nathaniel’s eyes, she knew she had to speak.
“I wasn’t snooping, Mr. Caldwell,” she whispered, her voice raspy from exhaustion. “Three weeks ago, I was putting away the dry cleaning in Miss Ashford’s guest suite. The bottom drawer of her vanity was stuck. When I tried to push it closed, a false bottom shifted.”
Nathaniel paused, his thumb lightly resting against her palm. “What was under it?”
Grace swallowed hard. “Folders. Bank statements. They weren’t in your name, but they had the Caldwell Enterprise logo on them. Huge transfers—millions of dollars—being routed to offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. And… there was a contract. It was signed by her and Arthur Vance.”
Nathaniel froze. Arthur Vance was his fiercest corporate rival, a man who had been trying to launch a hostile takeover of Caldwell Enterprises for two years.
“She’s bleeding your company dry, Mr. Caldwell,” Grace said, her voice shaking. “She realized I had seen the papers when she came into the room unexpectedly. Ever since that day, she’s been trying to break me so I would quit before I could tell you.”
Nathaniel stared at the wall for a long time, the pieces of the puzzle violently snapping into place. The missing capital. The sudden drop in stock prices. Victoria’s insistence on pushing their wedding date forward.
“You’re not going back to your apartment tonight,” Nathaniel said decisively, bandaging her final finger. “If she knows you know, you and your son aren’t safe. Where is he?”
