Chapter 5 - The Awakening of the Heiress
The high-grade fentanyl administered by the Vance medical team turned the agony in my leg into a distant, numb hum as they lifted me onto the titanium stretcher.
As they rolled me out of the narrow corridor into the brightly lit foyer, Alexander was slumped on the floor against the wall, clutching his bruised throat, coughing violently.
When he looked up and saw me being carried out, draped in a cashmere blanket bearing the crest of the Vance Corporation, his brain finally attempted to assemble the pieces of an impossible puzzle.
“Sophia?” Alexander wheezed, his eyes darting frantically between me and the legendary billionaire standing beside my gurney. “Sophia… what… what is this? How do you know Arthur Vance?”
Arthur stopped walking.
He turned around slowly, towering over Alexander like an impending storm. The air in the penthouse plummeted ten degrees.
“Her name,” Arthur said, his voice flat, resonant, and cold as a winter tomb, “is Sophia Vance. She was born to a name that could buy your family’s entire generation ten times over before breakfast.”
Alexander’s face lost every drop of color. His jaw dropped. “No… no, that’s impossible. Her name is Blackwood! She’s a freelance designer from Ithaca! She doesn’t have family!”
“She chose to use her mother’s name because she possessed the integrity to earn her way in this world without my shadow,” Arthur replied, his eyes narrowing with lethal precision. “She lowered herself to love a sewer rat like you. And because she was humble, you mistook her mercy for weakness.”
Clara stood up from the sofa, shaking, her voice trembling with hysteria. “Mr. Vance! Please! It wasn't me! Alexander forced me to come here! He’s the one who hit her! I tried to stop him!”
Alexander snapped his head toward her, betrayed and panicked. “You lying bitch! You unbuttoned my shirt!”
Arthur didn't even acknowledge the spectacle. He pulled a pristine linen handkerchief from his pocket, wiped a smudge of concrete dust from his cuff, and looked down at his security chief.
“Thomas.”
“Yes, Mr. Vance.”
“Take photographs of every drop of my daughter’s blood on these floors. Secure the building’s internal server racks before they can erase the lobby and elevator footage. And Thomas?”
“Sir?”
“Notify the surgical theater at Mount Sinai. I want the Chief of Orthopedics on standby. If my daughter experiences a single complication with that fracture, I will purchase the hospital and fire the entire board.”
“Understood, sir.”
Arthur walked alongside my stretcher as they moved into the private elevator. I reached out with a weak, trembling hand and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket.
“Dad,” I whispered through the haze of the painkillers.
He looked down, his eyes softening instantly. “Yes, sweetheart?”
“Don't just break their company,” I said, the fire in my eyes burning clear through the exhaustion. “Make them watch it burn from the sidewalk. I want Alexander to realize what he threw away.”
A slow, terrifying smile touched the corners of Arthur Vance’s lips. It was the same smile that had preceded the hostile takeovers of three Fortune 100 conglomerates.
May you like
“That, my darling,” Arthur said softly as the elevator doors sealed us in, “is a Vance family tradition.”
***
