I opened the safe. Inside lay stacks of pristine, bound cash, but I didn’t care about the money. I reached past the hundreds of thousands of dollars and grabbed the three encrypted black USB drives tucked in the very back.

These drives contained the ledgers. They held the offshore account routing numbers, the names of his silent partners, and the intricate web of bribes that kept him out of federal prison. This was his lifeblood. This was his freedom.

I slipped the drives into my purse. Then, I went to my vanity and pulled out a fresh, unopened tube of my signature red lipstick.

I walked over to the mirror in his bathroom—the one he used every morning to shave. I uncapped the crimson color and pressed it against the glass, writing a simple message in bright, unmistakable red:

She can have you. The Feds can have the rest.

I left the penthouse exactly at 11:00 AM. I didn’t take any of the jewelry he bought me, nor the designer clothes that felt like a uniform. I took only my passport, the USB drives, and a burner phone I had purchased months ago when my suspicions had first begun to bloom.

By the time I boarded a first-class flight to a country that did not have an extradition treaty with the United States, I was already dialing the direct line of a federal prosecutor who had been trying to build a case against Dominic for five years. I offered them the keys to his entire empire in exchange for absolute immunity and a new identity. They accepted before my plane even left the tarmac.

I ordered a glass of champagne as the aircraft ascended above the clouds. I imagined Dominic coming upstairs at noon, expecting an empty apartment, only to find the message on the mirror and an empty safe.

I imagined the panic finally breaking through his cool, untouchable exterior. He thought the woman with the plum lipstick was better than me. He thought she understood his life.

I smiled, taking a sip of the cold champagne. She was going to have to understand it real fast, because when the FBI kicked down the doors of that glass penthouse tomorrow morning, she was the one who would be standing by his side.