Chapter 6 - Unholy Alliances
The penthouse fell dead silent. Marcus looked up from his computer, his eyes wide behind his glasses.
"Julian didn't find Vanessa by accident," Marcus whispered, reading between the lines. "Vanessa found Julian."
"She wasn't his mistress," I realized, the horrifying puzzle snapping together in my mind. "She was his handler. They were working together to drain the Sterling Trust before my father could ever reclaim it."
"Exactly," Arthur confirmed over the speaker. "The forty million I wired today was meant to trigger the liquidation clause in Apex Crest. Once an unregistered capital injection of that size hits an unverified account, FINRA and the SEC freeze every connected offshore account within twenty-four hours. I was trying to force Julian to fly to London to explain himself. I didn't know he had already moved against you."
"Well, he failed," I said coldly, wiping the tears from my cheeks. My backbone stiffened. The pain of the last fourteen years, the humiliation of the sheared hair, the bruises—they were burning away, leaving behind a core of tempered steel. "Julian is bankrupt. His personal accounts are zeroed out, his penthouse belongs to me, and the Bell & Rose trademarks are registered under my private LLC."
"Then you hold the high ground," Arthur said. "But Julian is a cornered rat. And Richard Sterling’s daughter will not walk away from forty million dollars quietly. Elena, they will come for you."
"Let them come," I said. "I'm not the terrified bride he married fourteen years ago."
"Elena," Arthur’s voice softened, carrying a ghost of paternal warmth that almost broke my composure. "I have not been a father to you. I forfeited that right the day I faked my death. But that forty million dollars is now in an account you control. Use it. Take Bell & Rose. Crush them."
"I don't need your blood money to beat Julian," I stated firmly.
"It isn't blood money," Arthur said before hanging up. "It’s your mother's rightful inheritance. Check the founding documents in the Zurich folder, Elena. She was the genius behind the Sterling Group. Not me."
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The line went dead with a soft click.
Marcus tapped his keyboard, opening the Swiss documents attached to the wire. He looked up, his jaw slack. "He’s telling the truth, Elena. The primary owner of The Sterling Group wasn't Arthur. It was your mother, Evelyn Rose."