Chapter 4 Framed in Silence

The first time Mia saw the evidence against her, it was laid out on a steel table like a corpse under fluorescent light.

Bank statements. Tampered client contracts. A forged signature on a financial transfer. One that matched her handwriting exactly.

Jonas flipped through the files with a surgeon's precision. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing. Digital trails. Redundant backups. This wasn't a sloppy frame job. It was a masterpiece."

Mia sat across from him, silent, her fists clenched in her lap.

He glanced up. "You never signed these? "

"No," she said tightly. "Not a single one."

He nodded and continued. "But the forensic trail says otherwise. This email chain alone makes you look like the architect of the whole thing."

It was a meticulous digital crime, built piece by piece over months. Her digital ID had been cloned. She'd been subtly locked out of key systems at her firm while her logins were used for unauthorized access. She remembered thinking it was a tech glitch. A password delay. Nothing serious.

Daniel had even reassured her.

"You're not the most tech-savvy," he'd teased, brushing her hair from her face. "Let IT handle it."

Now it made her sick to remember.

Jonas tapped a photo-her signature at the bottom of a high-value transfer. "Your ex was smart. He didn't just cover his tracks. He paved yours."

Mia leaned in. "Can it be undone? "

"No. Not in court. The DA's office already ran with this. But..." He paused. "What we can do is reverse the spotlight. Shift the frame."

He reached into a file and pulled out something else-an invoice from a shell company in the Caymans, tied to Elena Black's name.

Mia's heart jumped.

"Let's say we don't clear your name," Jonas said. "Let's say we make them burn with you. Same methods. Same tools. Give them the ghost they made-and let her haunt them."

Mia swallowed hard. "I don't want revenge if I can't expose the truth."

"You're not going to get courtroom justice, Mia," Jonas said. "This city doesn't run on truth. It runs on leverage."

He slid the invoice toward her.

"And you're going to learn how to hold it like a knife."

Three days later, Mia sat in the back of a black town car with tinted windows, dressed in a brunette wig and a tailored navy suit. She looked every bit the role she needed to play: a mid-level legal auditor from an offshore compliance firm. The name on her forged badge was Alexis Reed.

She held a slim briefcase in her lap containing encrypted drives with fabricated but highly convincing data-data that would implicate Elena in a series of phantom money-laundering operations.

The target: Garrett & Cole, a minor investment firm laundering real estate kickbacks for Daniel's inner circle. Elena had a silent stake in it-Mia knew that now.

She walked in with confidence, head high, back straight. The receptionist barely looked up. A security badge was handed over without question.

"Conference Room B is yours," the assistant said cheerfully.

Mia smiled politely.

Ten minutes later, she had the firm's router cloned, a listening device planted under the table, and her fake audit loaded onto their internal system. The damage would take weeks to unravel, and Elena's name would appear on three flagged documents.

The trap was set.

But this wasn't the end.

This was her reply.

They framed her in silence.

Now she was answering in kind.