My Husband Humiliated Me At His Billion-Dollar Gala — So I Took Everything

Part 2

The icy rain soaked through my coat, but I barely felt the cold as I stared at the metal drive.

The divorce papers arrived the very next morning at exactly six o’clock.

They were delivered not by a standard courier, but by a team of private security guards led by Brian’s head of legal.

Craig Taylor was a shark of a man, and he just happened to be Megan’s uncle.

I was sitting on the floor of the guest bedroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes, having not slept a single wink.

Craig stepped into the room without knocking, his two massive guards flanking him like statues.

He informed me that Brian required the premises to be vacated by noon.

He tossed a thick, heavy envelope onto the mattress, but I refused to touch it.

I couldn’t believe Brian was actually kicking me out of the house we had bought together.

Craig sneered, adjusting his expensive silk tie, correcting me that it was the house Brian had bought.

He claimed I was merely listed as a dependent due to the prenuptial agreement I had supposedly signed.

I stood up, my voice steady as I told him I never signed a prenup because we had absolutely nothing when we got married.

Craig smiled a thin, reptilian smile and pulled a document from his sleek briefcase.

He showed me my own signature from three years ago, obtained during the company’s massive restructuring phase.

Brian had told me it was just a standard tax form to keep the auditors off our backs.

I had trusted him completely, signing away my rights to the assets in exchange for a pathetic lump sum.

Craig checked his watch, telling me I had exactly four hours before anything left behind was incinerated.

He added that Brian specifically wanted the garbage he threw out last night to burn personally.

My hand went instinctively to my chest, feeling the hard outline of the SD card hidden beneath my shirt.

I lied smoothly, telling him I had thrown it away in a random dumpster on Fifth Avenue.

Craig narrowed his eyes and ordered his men to tear through my meager belongings.

They ripped open my suitcase and dumped my clothes onto the floor, searching pockets and linings.

They didn’t find anything, and Craig finally told me to get out, leaving me alone in the wreckage of my life.

When the door clicked shut, I pulled the folded parchment from my bra, my hands shaking violently.

It was a deed of trust signed by my grandfather, granting the usage of his logic code solely to his bloodline.

It stated that any commercial application without my direct consent would result in the immediate reversion of all intellectual property.

I packed my small bag and left the sprawling mansion, the heavy iron gates slamming shut behind me.

I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the public library in Queens.

I needed to know exactly what was on that drive before Brian’s men realized what was missing.

I found a quiet terminal, plugged in the SD card, and watched the green command prompt appear.

It asked for a passphrase, and after two terrifying, failed attempts, I finally guessed the name of the broken horse on the music box.

The screen unlocked, cascading files, schematics, and emails that proved Brian had stolen the entire algorithm.

I discovered a doomsday file with a lifespan set to expire next week, meaning the whole system would soon crash.

A shadow suddenly fell over my desk, and I spun around, my heart leaping into my throat.

An eccentric old man in a worn trench coat stood there, offering a hand missing a pinky finger.

He told me his name was Dan Peterson and that he had built the box my husband had smashed.

He warned me that Brian’s men were waiting outside in black SUVs and that we needed to run immediately.

Who was this man, and how did he know what I had found?