The company was called Meridian Trust, and by the time Sterling's lawyers finished pulling its records apart at two in the morning, Ivy understood exactly what her father in law had built.

"It's a shell," the lead attorney said, spreading documents across the kitchen table with the particular grim efficiency of someone who'd seen this exact structure before, because he had, nine years ago, in a very different case file. "Registered eighteen months ago, no real operations, but it's been used to move funds through at least four other entities we've traced so far, entities currently under federal investigation for the same pattern of fraud your father was convicted of...