Leo scrambled over to a briefcase on the sofa, pulled out a thick leather folder, and handed it to Chloe. She flipped it open. It was my employment contract.
“You want to work in the beauty industry, Harper?” Chloe asked, her voice dropping to a terrifying, quiet register. “You think you deserve to be in the same room as me?”
“I just want to do my job, Ms. Sterling,” I said, keeping my voice perfectly level, though my heart was beginning to pound against my ribs.
“You don’t have a job!” Chloe shrieked, the sudden volume making me flinch.
Before I could react, she raised her hand and swung.
The slap echoed through the dressing room like a gunshot.
The physical force of it snapped my head violently to the side. A sharp, stinging heat exploded across my left cheek. I stumbled back a step, catching myself against the corner of the makeup counter to keep from falling. My ear was ringing.
The room went dead silent.
I didn’t touch my face. I just slowly turned my head back to look at her. The urge to break my cover, to tell her exactly who I was and watch her entire world crumble into ash right here, right now, was a roaring fire in my chest.
But I saw Zara and Leo behind her. They weren’t shocked. They weren’t horrified. Leo was smiling slightly, and Zara looked entirely bored. This wasn’t an anomaly. This was how Chloe maintained power.
“You incompetent sewer rat,” Chloe spat, leaning into my face. She ripped the contract out of the leather folder. “You think you belong here?”
She held the thick document right in front of my eyes and tore it in half with a violent, tearing sound. She stacked the halves and ripped them again, then threw the shredded pieces directly at my chest. They fluttered down around my sneakers.
“Your trial is over. You are nothing in this industry,” Chloe said, turning her back on me.
Zara stepped forward, physically boxing me out, and threw a heavy sequined dress over the chair beside me. “You heard her. Get out of the VIP wing. But don’t think you get to go home and cry. You’re still on the clock until midnight setting up the folding chairs for the press, since that’s all you’re good for.”
“And Harper?” Chloe called out, admiring her reflection again. “Make sure you wear extra concealer tomorrow. You look terrible.”
I looked at the shredded paper on the floor. I nodded once, a slow, mechanical movement. “Yes, Ms. Sterling.”
I turned and walked out of the dressing room, keeping my back perfectly straight until the heavy door clicked shut behind me. Once I was in the empty hallway, I let out a shaky breath and pressed my fingers to my burning cheek.
My father had told me to find out who Chloe Sterling really was. Now I knew.
But the slap wasn’t the mission. The mission was the truth. Zara’s comment about the debt was the thread I needed to pull.
I didn’t go to the event space to set up chairs. Instead, I moved silently down the private executive corridor toward Chloe’s private office. She rarely locked it during the day because she assumed her staff was too terrified to even look at the door handle. She was right about them.
The hallway was clear. I gripped the brass handle of her office door, turned it, and slipped inside, shutting it silently behind me.
The office was a massive glass corner suite overlooking the LA skyline. I moved immediately to her expansive glass desk. Her primary computer was locked, but sitting near the edge of the desk was a thick, red leather binder I had never seen before. It had a physical brass padlock clamping it shut.
Normally, a physical lock would deter an assistant. But when you grow up with unlimited resources and elite security details, you pick up a few unusual skills. I pulled a simple bobby pin from my messy hair, snapped it in half, and worked it into the small brass mechanism. Ten seconds later, the lock clicked open.
I flipped the binder open, my eyes scanning the pages rapidly.
My breath caught in my throat.
These weren’t marketing plans. They were internal ingredient manifests and shipping logs from the past eight months. The documents Chloe had submitted to my father’s acquisition team claimed Aura Beauty used premium, ethical, European-sourced ingredients.
The invoices in this binder proved she had quietly canceled those contracts a year ago. She was sourcing from a notorious, unregulated chemical plant in an overseas market known for severe health violations. She wasn’t just bankrupt; she was selling toxic filler masked behind pretty pink labels to stay afloat.
I pulled out my burner phone and started frantically snapping pictures of every single page. The flash was off, but the faint click of the digital shutter seemed deafening in the quiet room.
I reached the final section of the binder. It contained an urgent legal notice dated yesterday. It was a foreclosure warning on the Culver City warehouse. The building we were standing in was thirty days away from being repossessed by the bank.
If Arthur Vance signed the contract tomorrow and injected fifty million dollars of capital into Aura, Chloe could pay off the toxic suppliers, hide the debt, and secure her fortune, leaving Vance Retail to take the catastrophic fallout when the chemical burns started happening to customers.
She was trying to con my father.
I took the last picture, carefully re-stacked the papers, and reached over to close the red binder.