We ended up back at my house so the police could take a full statement, and I didn’t object when Brianna asked to come along. We weren’t friends, but we were two witnesses to a very long con.
At 3:47 AM, I sat on my kitchen floor and called my bank’s emergency line. The agent confirmed that someone had tried to move a massive sum from my business savings to Summit Peak just an hour prior, but the security flag had frozen the account.
I was paralyzed by the realization that Dorian didn’t just want to leave me. He wanted to drain me dry and leave me with nothing but the bills.
The next morning, I met with my attorney, Meredith, while Brianna sat beside me in a coffee shop in Tempe. Meredith looked over the screenshots Brianna had recovered from Dorian’s phone before she blocked him.
In one message, Dorian told Brianna: “Just give me two days and I will have the cash to get us out of here.” Then there was a voice memo where his voice sounded sickeningly sweet.
“Skylar thinks she needs me to run her life. Once the wire clears, I’m gone. Women always want to be the hero or the martyr, and if you play the right part, they’ll do all the work for you.”
Meredith tapped her pen on the table and looked at me. “Back that up in three different clouds immediately.”
I didn’t feel like crying anymore; I felt a strange, surgical calm. I realized the house hadn’t just caught fire by accident; Dorian had been pouring gasoline in every corner while I was sleeping.
I spent the day changing every password and filing a formal police report for grand larceny. When I finally pulled back into my driveway, I found Dorian standing there with his mother, Lydia.
Lydia was dressed in a sharp blazer and pearls, wearing that expression of a woman who believed her son was a king who could do no wrong. “That is quite enough of this drama,” she said the moment I stepped out of the truck. “Dorian says you are fabricating lies because you are jealous.”
I looked at Dorian, who was now sober and wearing a mask of cold fury. “Your son stole my family ring and tried to embezzle twenty-eight thousand dollars from my company,” I told her.
Lydia didn’t even flinch. “You have no proof of any criminal intent, Skylar.”
Dorian took a step toward me, his ego finally overriding his common sense. “You owe me that money for all the time I invested in this pathetic relationship!”
I stared him down until he blinked. “Invested? You mean the rent you skipped? Or the groceries I paid for? Or the money you tried to steal while I was in the next room?”
His face went pale as he realized Lydia couldn’t protect him from the paper trail I now held in my hands.
Three days later, the financial crimes unit discovered that Summit Peak Holdings wasn’t even Dorian’s company. The legal owner was actually Lydia.
She hadn’t just been defending her son; she was the one who had set up the shell company to receive the stolen funds. It turned out that Dorian had a history of this, moving from city to city and leaving a trail of broken hearts and empty bank accounts.
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