Married to the Billionaire Who Betrayed Me novel Chapter 101

Chapter 101 Hacking the Sealed Court Archives

The blue light from the laptop screen cast a pale glow across the dark penthouse. The city outside my window remained silent The

clock on the wall read three in the morning.

I stared at the search engine. I typed my mother’s name again. Natalia Serrano. I crossed it with the Johnston corporate database. I

pressed the enter key.

The screen flashed white. No results found.

They erased her. Harriet Montgomery wielded enough capital to wipe a human being from the public record.

I closed the laptop lid. I pushed the machine away. I rested my elbows on the glass desk and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. The exhaustion burned, but sleep remained impossible. The old silver key Arthur Vance gave me sat on the glass surface. It caught the faint city light. It was a piece of metal that unlocked three billion dollars. It was the key to the life Harriet stole from us.

I picked up my secure phone. I dialed a number.

He answered on the fourth ring. His voice sounded thick with sleep. “Miss Hayes?”

‘I need your team, Diego,” I said.

Diego Morales cleared his throat. “It is the middle of the night. Did the Ashcroft transition fail?”

“The transition is fine,” I told my head of acquisitions. “I need your data miners. I need the people you use to dig up buried corporate liabilities before we buy a company. I need them to bypass the public search filters.”

“Who is the target?” Diego asked. The sleep vanished from his tone.

“A ghost,” I said. “Bring your encrypted drives to my apartment. Come alone.”

An hour later, Diego sat across from me at the dining table. He wore a rumpled gray sweater. He placed two thick laptops on the

wood surface. He connected a tangled web of cables to a portable black server.

“The Johnston family employs the best digital security firms in the country,” Diego warned. His fingers flew across his keyboard. Lines of green code cascaded down his screen. “If we hit their main servers, we trip an alarm. They will track the intrusion back to

this IP address within minutes.”

‘Do not hit the corporate servers, I instructed. “We are looking for a thirty-year-old paper trail. Harriet sealed the internal ledgers, but she had to use the legal system to enforce the theft. We need to look at the county court archives. We need civil disputes.

Breach of contract filings. Look for the year 1996,”

“A name?” Diego asked.

“Natalia Serrano,” I said. The name felt heavy on my tongue. “Cross-reference it with the estate of Alexander Johnston.”

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Chapter 101 Hacking the Sealed Court Archives

Diego typed the parameters. The cooling fans in his laptops whined, working hard to scrape the deepest layers of the digitized/’

municipal archives.

We sat in silence. I poured two cups of black coffee. The dark liquid tasted bitter and sharp. I watched the sky outside the floor-to-

ceiling windows turn a bruised, pale purple. Morning approached.

“The public court dockets from 1996 show nothing,” Diego reported. He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘No lawsuits under the name

Natalia Serrano.”

“Dig deeper,” I pushed. “Arthur Vance is a senior trust lawyer. He does not risk his career on a guess. My mother fought Harriet.

know she did. Harriet threatened her, but my mother was not a coward.”

Diego typed a new string of commands.

“If Harriet forced the judge to seal the case,” Diego thought aloud, “the primary docket name disappears from the public search. We

need to search the intake logs. The physical microfiche records the clerks digitized ten years ago. They sometimes forget to redact

the initial filing receipts.”

He opened a backdoor into the municipal archive server. He bypassed the standard search bar and accessed the raw image files. He

set a program to scan the images for specific text matches.

We waited. The sun broke over the horizon, flooding the penthouse with harsh, blinding light.

A sharp chime broke the silence.

Diego stopped breathing. He leaned close to his screen. He clicked an image file. A scanned document appeared. It looked old. The

type was faded and crooked.

“I have a receipt,” Diego whispered. August 14, 1996. Intake desk, civil division.”

He turned the laptop toward me.

I stared at the screen. The scanned paper showed a stamp from the county clerk. Below the stamp, written in the clear, sharp

handwriting I remembered from my childhood, was my mother’s signature.

Cause of Action: Missing Beneficiary Claim. Plaintiff: Natalia Serrano. Defendant; Harriet Montgomery, Executor of the Alexander

Johnston Estate. The air left my lungs. The room seemed to tilt.

“She filed a lawsuit,” I said. My voice shook.

“She claimed her shares, Diego agreed. He clicked his mouse, pulling up the corresponding case number from the receipt. “Let us

see what happened to the filing.”

He typed the hidden case number into the restricted court database. A brief summary appeared.

Case dismissed with prejudice. September 2, 1996. All records sealed by order of the presiding judge. “Eighteen days, I noted. The anger

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