Chapter 2 - The Digital Guillotine
The silence in the mansion after the ambulance departed was deafening. Evelyn stood trembling by the grand staircase, furiously dialing numbers on her diamond-encrusted smartphone. She was calling her high-priced defense attorneys, the sleazy fixers she had relied on to manipulate my father's estate.
I watched her from the center of the room, arms crossed, savoring the exact moment her reality began to fracture.
"Pick up, damn it," Evelyn hissed into the phone. She hung up and dialed another number. "Richard? Richard, it's Evelyn. I have an emergency—wait, what do you mean you can't represent me? What conflict of interest?!"
I allowed a small, predatory smile to touch my lips. "Having trouble finding counsel, Evelyn?"
She snapped her head toward me, her eyes wide with a mixture of hatred and growing terror. "What did you do?"
"Corporate law is a small world," I explained slowly, as if speaking to a slow child. "When I realized you were torturing my father, I didn't just book a flight home. I spent the last week systematically meeting with every top-tier defense attorney and estate litigator in the tri-state area. I paid them hefty consultation fees to discuss hypothetical 'corporate restructuring.' Under the rules of professional conduct, every single one of those lawyers is now legally conflicted out of representing you against me."
Evelyn’s jaw dropped. The phone slipped from her hand, clattering against the marble floor.
"You... you couldn't have..."
"I did," I confirmed. "You’re going to have to settle for a public defender. Or maybe a strip-mall lawyer who specializes in traffic tickets."
Julian, who had been released by the guards but was still backed into a corner, tried to salvage his crumbling ego. "It doesn't matter! The bank accounts are in our names! We transferred the liquid assets yesterday. You can kick us out of the house, but we have thirty million dollars in offshore accounts. We can buy better lawyers than you can ever imagine."
I let out a soft laugh. It wasn't a cruel laugh, just a genuinely amused one.
"Julian," I sighed. "Did you really think a woman who specializes in forensic accounting would let you keep the money?"
I walked over to the mahogany console table, opened my laptop, and turned the screen toward them. It displayed the banking portals for the Cayman Island accounts they thought were untraceable. All of them flashed the same red banner across the top: ACCOUNT FROZEN - FEDERAL INVESTIGATION PENDING.
"Yesterday, I filed a suspicious activity report with the SEC, the FBI, and international banking authorities," I said. "I provided them with the IP addresses of the computers used to forge my father's electronic signatures. Spoiler alert, Julian: you used the mansion's Wi-Fi. Every single dime you stole is locked in federal purgatory. You have no money. You have no house. You have no lawyers."
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Evelyn let out a choked, guttural sob. She looked around the opulent foyer, realizing that the golden cage she had built for herself was rapidly shrinking.
"Forty-five minutes left," I reminded them, tapping my watch. "I suggest you start packing. The security team gets very hands-on when they are impatient."
