My father had been in the ground less than three hours when my brother-in-law stood in the center of the drawing room and announced that his wife was inheriting it all.

The next three days were a blur of sleepless nights, cold coffee, and relentless strategy.

We turned Dad’s drawing room into a war room. While the IT specialist cracked the encrypted files from the penthouse server, Alexander and I started calling board members.

It was a nightmare. Victoria had poisoned the well. She had decades of high-society networking on her side, whereas I was the younger sibling who had focused on the operational side of the business, staying out of the spotlight. Alexander was a complete unknown.

“They won’t listen to me,” I said in frustration, hanging up the phone on a major investor who had just called me a traitor to my own family.

“We don’t need them to like us,” Alexander said, reviewing the decrypted files. “We need them to fear for their own wallets.”

He turned the laptop around. “Look at this.”

The decrypted emails showed that Victoria and Richard hadn't just been stealing from the company; they had been stealing from the investors. They had inflated shipping costs and pocketed the margins.

“This is explosive,” I said. “But if we reveal this, the stock plummets. We destroy the company’s reputation.”

“We control the narrative,” Harrison advised. “We present the evidence to the board privately. We force Victoria and Richard to step down and surrender their shares to avoid federal prison. The company bleeds a little, but it survives.”

It was a risky play. If Victoria called our bluff, the ensuing public scandal would ruin everything Dad had built. But it was the only play we had.

Thursday night, the eve of the board meeting, my phone rang. It was Victoria.

“I want to meet,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual arrogance. “Just you and me. No lawyers. No secret brothers. Just sisters.”