Chapter 3 - The War Room
By two o'clock in the morning, my living room in my private downtown penthouse had been converted into a command center.
The left side of my face was swollen and dark purple, my skull throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that the paramedic’s painkillers could barely touch. But my mind had never been clearer. I wore a clean black turtleneck, my wet hair pulled back into a tight bun away from the bandages on my left temple.
Marcus Vance sat at my quartz kitchen island, surrounded by four open laptops, two portable hard drives, and thick stacks of financial ledgers he had pulled from his firm’s private server. At sixty-two, Marcus looked like a silver-haired shark—sharp, immaculately tailored, with dark eyes that saw through every corporate lie ever written on a balance sheet.
“Let’s review the board,” Marcus said, tapping his gold pen against a white dry-erase board he had set up near the window. “Jackson thinks he’s getting out on bail by nine AM tomorrow. His father, Richard, is using the family’s real estate trust to post the hundred-thousand-dollar bond.”
“Let him get out,” I said, pouring hot water into a mug. “The criminal charge is just the cover story. What did you find in the trust?”
Marcus clicked a key on his main laptop, pulling up a complex flow chart detailing thirty different limited liability companies registered in Delaware, Nevada, and the Cayman Islands.
“Richard Vance has been running a massive ponzi-style tax avoidance scheme through the family real estate empire for eight years,” Marcus explained, his finger tracing a red line on the screen. “He’s been taking out secondary mortgages on the Beverly Hills estate, routing the cash through Jackson’s failed tech startups to claim massive tax write-offs, and then using your marital assets as collateral to secure corporate loans.”
I stopped with the mug halfway to my lips. “He used my Minneapolis apartment as collateral?”
“Not just the apartment, Chloe,” Marcus said, looking up with an expression of cold satisfaction. “Three months ago, Jackson forged your signature on a quitclaim deed, transferring forty percent of your architectural firm’s equity and the deed to your Minneapolis high-rise into Vance Global Holdings—the shell company Richard uses to pay off his gambling debts in Macau.”
A cold, lethal silence settled over the room.
They hadn't just insulted me at a dinner table. They hadn't just tried to bully me into giving Grace a place to live. They had already committed systematic identity theft, mortgage fraud, and corporate embezzlement behind my back for months, using my success to rescue their sinking ship.
The plate throwing wasn't an isolated outburst of temper—it was the desperate panic of a family that realized I was about to discover their crime.
“Show me the forged signatures,” I commanded softly.
Marcus pulled up a high-resolution PDF of the quitclaim deed filed with the county registrar six weeks ago. There, at the bottom of the legal document, was a rough, clumsy attempt at my signature, notarized by a crooked notary public who worked out of one of Richard’s construction offices.
I pulled my personal tablet toward me, opening my security app. “They made one massive mistake, Marcus.”
“What’s that?”
“The day this document was allegedly signed in Los Angeles, I was giving a keynote presentation at the International Urban Design Summit in Tokyo in front of twelve hundred people, broadcast live on three international news networks.”
Marcus let out a low whistle, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. “An ironclad, unbreakable alibi. That’s not just civil fraud, Chloe. That’s federal wire fraud, bank fraud, and felony forgery. It carries a mandatory ten-year federal prison sentence.”
“Call the Special Investigations Unit of the IRS,” I said, setting my mug down with a hard thud. “And call my corporate litigation team. I want emergency freezes placed on every bank account bearing the Vance name before the courthouse opens at eight AM.”
“What about Jackson?” Marcus asked, his eyes gleaming.
May you like
I looked at the reflection of my bruised face in the dark window overlooking the city skyline.
“Jackson thinks he’s walking out of jail tomorrow into his parents’ warm embrace,” I whispered. “I’m going to make sure he walks out directly into a wall of federal marshals.”
