Part 3: The Document Discrepancy
The news of the corporate ambush forced us to relocate to my private office suite on the top floor of the tower.
Kate sat on the leather sofa, holding Emma on her lap while the young girl quietly colored on a small notepad.
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, watching the gray clouds roll over the Hudson River landscape.
"The board didn't just invent that default clause, Marcus," I said, turning to look at the documents on the desk.
"Someone within the family network leaked our internal asset-tracking coordinates to a secondary competitor."
"The leak originated from an internal IP address registered to Richard Carter," Naomi Pierce added, entering the suite.
Naomi, our senior financial analyst, connected a secure field drive to the central projection monitor on the wall.
The grand screens lit up instantly, displaying forty pages of unredacted transaction summaries from a shell firm.
"Your cousin Richard has been partnering with a developer from Connecticut to freeze your licensing," she explained.
"They wanted to force a liquidation before the quarterly audit could expose their own financial deficit."
Kate looked up from the sofa, her blue eyes narrowing as she recognized the nameplate on the screen.
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"Richard approached me three months ago, Henry," she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous whisper.
"He told me that if I didn't sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding Emma, he would ruin my bakery business."
