“What leverage?” Richard asked, stepping closer to the chair.

Vale looked up at me, his eyes filled with a desperate kind of fear.

“She knew about my firm’s tax discrepancies,” Vale said. “She was going to destroy my career.”

“So you destroyed my life instead,” I said, stepping toward him.

“I didn’t have a choice, Emily,” Vale said, his voice cracking.

“You always had a choice,” Richard said, his voice cutting through the room like ice.

Nora picked up the silver USB drive and plugged it into her laptop.

The screen flashed, and a new directory of folders appeared on the screen.

“These are the bank routing numbers,” Nora said, clicking through the files. “And the wire confirmations.”

“They match the duplicate ledgers my team pulled last night,” Richard said.

“This is the paper trail that puts Margaret Whitmore in federal prison,” Nora said.

She leaned back in her chair, looking at Vale with a cold, professional gaze.

“And it puts you right next to her in a matching cell,” Nora added.

Vale put his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking slightly.