Chapter 6 - Crown of Glass
At precisely eight o'clock that morning, the Sterling Tower private elevator dinged softly on the eighty-fifth floor.
I stepped out into the marble corridor, flanked by two armed Sterling security guards. Gone was the mousy, quiet girl in oversized knit sweaters and scuffed flats. The doctor had treated my burns with advanced synthetic skin grafts, hidden beneath the high silk collar of an emerald-green Tom Ford suit. My hair was pulled back into a sharp, flawless chignon, and diamond studs glinted at my ears.
The floor was a hive of frantic activity. Hundreds of junior analysts and corporate attorneys were scrambling over monitors, crunching numbers at breakneck speed.
"Claire," Arthur called out from the open doors of the boardroom. He looked refreshed, a sharp contrast to the financial storm brewing outside. "You look like yourself again."
"Better than myself," I replied, walking into the room with my head held high. I took the leather chair at the head of the mahogany conference table—a table three times larger and infinitely more powerful than Eleanor’s dining board. "Give me the Vance file."
Arthur slid a thick black binder toward me. "Vance Capital is completely exposed. Julian took massive short positions on European tech bonds last quarter, anticipating a market correction that never happened. To cover the shortfall, he leveraged the Vance ancestral estate, his mother’s jewelry collection, and their commercial real estate holdings in Midtown."
I flipped through the pages, scanning the numbers with the ruthless precision Arthur had spent twenty years teaching me before I rebelled for love.
"Julian didn't just overextend," I noted, my eyes hardening as I spotted an anomaly in the Cayman subsidiaries. "He pledged my name as a co-guarantor on the secondary subordinated debt without my knowledge. He forged my signature on the credit guarantees three months ago."
Arthur’s eyes turned to cold flint. "That is federal bank fraud. He was planning to make you the sacrificial lamb if the positions went under."
May you like
A bitter smile touched my lips. Julian hadn't just tolerated his mother's abuse; he had been laying the groundwork to destroy me financially while keeping his own hands clean.
"Don't call the FBI yet, Dad," I said quietly, closing the file. "Let them squirm first. Summon Julian Vance and his mother to the Sterling executive suite for a debt restructuring meeting at noon."
