Chapter 7 - The Arrests at Dawn
Before the meeting with Richard could take place, the final shoe dropped on the Vance family’s conspirators.
At 5:30 AM on a rainy Tuesday morning, federal marshals and FBI agents executed coordinated search warrants across three states.
In a luxury penthouse in Tribeca, Harold Montgomery—the former Zoning Commission Chairman and Ethan’s would-be father-in-law—was arrested while still wearing his monogrammed silk pajamas. Agents carried out twenty-two cardboard boxes filled with offshore wire receipts and architectural blueprints that had bypassed city safety inspections in exchange for cash envelopes delivered by Ethan Vance.
In Greenwich, Connecticut, Chloe Montgomery watched in stunned horror as federal marshals loaded her father’s collection of vintage Italian sports cars onto flatbed tow trucks, seizing every asset linked to the Vance bribery scheme.
When a swarm of reporters thrust microphones into her face outside her gated driveway, asking if she had any comment on her former fiancé’s impending life sentence, Chloe threw her designer handbag at a cameraman, broke her heel on the pavement, and retreated behind the locked security gates in tears.
The public reaction was immediate and merciless.
The internet had turned the entire saga into a modern-day morality play. Memes, video breakdowns, and financial podcasts analyzed how Richard Vance’s pathological misogyny and blind favoritism toward his incompetent son had ultimately led to the complete annihilation of his family’s bloodline and business.
*“He slapped a billionaire’s wife and lost his entire life in forty-eight hours,”* one viral commentary video proclaimed, garnering over forty million views in three days. *“Richard Vance forgot that the daughter he discarded was the only one in that house with an actual brain.”*
Meanwhile, the Vance name was systematically erased from New York real estate.
The Vance Construction signs that had loomed over construction sites across the city were taken down, replaced by Hale Infrastructure banners. The sub-standard steel beams Ethan had illegally ordered for a high-rise in Midtown were condemned, removed, and replaced with military-grade reinforced alloys at Alexander’s expense, saving hundreds of future residents from a catastrophic structural failure.
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The city that Richard Vance had spent forty years trying to conquer through deceit had finally discarded him like a piece of rusted scaffolding.
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