Chapter 10 - The Emergency Midnight Summons
Just as Julian stood up to escort me to his car, Marcus Hall’s phone buzzed with an urgent priority tone.
Marcus answered, his face hardening as he listened to the voice on the other end. He held the phone to his chest and looked at Julian with an expression of sudden alarm.
“Julian,” Marcus said, his voice tense. “We have a massive problem.”
Julian paused, his hand still resting on the back of my chair. “What is it? Gregory couldn't have made bail or filed an injunction this quickly.”
“It’s not Gregory,” Marcus whispered, glancing around the room. “It’s the institutional banking consortium in New York. They just triggered a clause for an immediate midnight emergency conference. Someone just leaked the entire forensic audit to the financial press. The headlines are already hitting the wires: *'Vance Hospitality Group Faces Criminal Embezzlement and Civil Rights Investigations.'*”
Julian’s eyes narrowed. “How could that leak within an hour? Nobody outside this room had access to those files.”
“Someone had them pre-packaged, Julian,” Sarah Briggs said, tapping furiously on her tablet. “The press release was drafted two hours *before* your mother even walked through those doors tonight. This wasn't just Gregory stealing money on the side. This was a coordinated takedown.”
I looked at Julian, a cold chill running down my spine.
Anna’s cruelty, the thrown dinner, the downgraded ingredients—it was all deliberate. It was designed to provoke a public scandal, to create an explosive scene that would drag the Vance name through the mud and cause the stock value to crater before the markets opened on Monday morning.
“Who stands to gain from forcing a fire-sale of our company?” Julian asked, his voice deadpan and dangerous.
Sarah looked up from the screen, her face completely pale.
“There’s an offshore holding company that just placed a bid to buy sixty percent of our distressed debt notes at a thirty percent discount,” Sarah said, her voice trembling slightly. “The bid was registered fifteen minutes ago. The owner of that holding company isn't Gregory.”
“Then who is it?” Julian demanded.
Sarah swallowed hard. “The entity is registered under the name *Vance Heritage Trust Limited*... out of Zurich.”
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I froze.
The breath caught in my throat so sharply that I had to brace myself against the mahogany table. That name had not been spoken in thirty-five years. Not since the day Robert had severed all ties with his older brother, Thomas Vance—the man who had vanished after attempting to sell our original recipes to an industrial food syndicate.
