Page 38 of Secret Revenge

This gave me no satisfaction or vindication for my vendetta. All my years of hard work to bring down the Rosses, and the time I spent working against Travis… was for nothing. The futility was crushing.

More than anything else, I was reeling because I hated the way all of this made me feel.

I hated that I actually loved the fact that he was clean. I hated that I was relieved and felt lighter than I had in months. I hated that I’d had my fingers crossed the whole time that this would be the outcome.

Now I really did feel guilty for deceiving him. And worse: part of me was relieved. This was very bad, because I was relieved that I could pursue a relationship with him without feeling guilty. And no, I absolutely could not. Not after tonight. Tomorrow his lawyers would probably be serving me papers to throw me in prison.

What had I done? How had I managed to put myself in a situation where I would not only be imprisoned, but imprisoned by the man I loved?

Snap out of it, Emily. You don’t love him.

The part of me that had been falling for him had been secretly hoping that the kind persona he put out there for people was the real him and there was nothing else to discover outside of that. Part of me had been hoping he’d prove me wrong, not just about himself, but about humanity in general.

And he had. And now he was going to hate me. Rightfully so.

“This can’t be happening,” Michael murmured in shock, breaking our long silence.

Then I gasped as something Travis had said came back to me.

“Oh! The secret file. Remember the secret file on his phone? We haven’t found anything obviously secret yet.” I told him. “Maybe we can find something about this secret project that wecan use against him. There must be a reason he concealed those files so much more carefully than anything else on his phone.”

There it was: my last hope. My last hope of a story, of a career, of freedom. My chances for a relationship with Travis were already gone, one way or another.

If he’d encrypted something on his phone even more tightly than his other personal files, maybe he’d done the same on his company’s servers.

Michael frowned. “You’re right. There must be something we haven’t found yet. I’ll run a deep scan for any hidden files, for any data that could possibly be concealed.”

I got up to make us coffee. Hours later, he found it: sure enough, there was a secret file on the drive. He’d had to use special software to even root out its existence.

The file was filled with folders and each of those folders was titled with the names of different people.

I leaned forward as I tried to understand what it was I was looking at. Were they the names of people that they had killed? People he had blackmailed or stalked? People he was having illicit relationships, or illicit business dealings with?

Michael clicked on one.

These were the names of people that had been ruined and whose companies had gone under. Every single one of them.

However, I had been wrong about everything else. None of this directly had anything to do with Travis or his brothers.

Every single bit of information on the ruination of these people and their companies was there, but it was not from when Travis was in charge but instead when his father had been in charge.

These were the list of people his father had hurt and while it would prove useful if we chose to publish it, it was not new information to the public that their father had hurt people, and it would do nothing to harm the Ross Brothers.

In every single file we had gone through, there was a bottom aspect of the file labeled ‘reparations’.

Some were labeled ‘reparations underway’ and others were labeled ‘reparations to be made’.

I took control from Michael, ignoring his usual rule about not letting anyone touch his computers as I went through more of the files to be certain that they all had labeling under it stating the same things.

“There’s no way,” Michael said as he nudged me aside. He immediately searched up his own name as I wondered what it was that he was up to.

His name appeared as one of the folders. I opened it to read it and saw that Michael’s mom had been a business woman. I looked at him after I had read the file. His mother’s company had gone down and I did not need the rest of the contents of the file to tell me that Travis’s father had been responsible for that.

“There’s no way, they are looking for me because they want to give me reparations?” he gasped in shock, causing me to look back at the screen. I read further, surprised to see that they had been looking for him.

“Look for me,” I said, my voice gravelly and thick from my warring emotions.

Michael typed in the name Skye and shook his head at her when he saw nothing. “I can’t find anything on Skye.”