Chapter 2 - THE WOMAN IN RED
Her name was Naomi Bell.
Twenty-six years old.
A junior financial analyst at Vale Meridian Partners.
Three months before the gala, she walked into my office wearing a red coat and shaking so badly she could not hold a cup of water.
“I need help,” she said.
At the time, I barely knew Preston Vale.
Everyone knew his name.
Old money.
Private equity.
Political donations.
Magazine covers.
The kind of family that owned buildings with their name carved into stone.
Naomi worked for him.
She said he cornered her after a company dinner.
When she rejected him, her performance reviews suddenly changed.
Then came the threats.
Then a settlement agreement.
Then an envelope containing photographs of her entering a clinic.
“Where did he get these?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What does he want?”
“For me to disappear.”
I was not a lawyer.
I ran Arden Risk Group, a private security and forensic investigations firm founded by my father, Elias Arden.
We protected executives, families, witnesses, and sometimes people with enough money to be terrified in more expensive ways.
Naomi had no money.
I took her case anyway.
Why?
Because my mother had once been a woman nobody believed.
She died when I was seventeen.
I never forgot the sound of people telling her to “avoid making trouble.”
Naomi gave me emails.
Voice messages.
Photographs.
One security clip stolen from an office archive before it was deleted.
The man in the clip was Preston.
He grabbed her.
She pushed him away.
He laughed.
Then he told her, “Nobody here is going to choose you over me.”
He was right.
The company paid her.
HR buried the complaint.
The security director deleted the file.
But Naomi copied it first.
I asked her one question.
“Are there others?”
She looked at me.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I know of four.”
Four became seven.
Seven became eleven.
Then one woman vanished from the city entirely.
Her name was Tessa Morgan.
Preston’s former executive assistant.
Nobody knew where she went.
Two weeks before the gala, I found her.
Not dead.
Not missing.
Hiding.
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And she had a hard drive containing something far worse than assault complaints.
She had evidence Preston’s family had been paying people to erase them.
