Chapter 16 - THE SWISS CONNECTION
By midnight, Julian and Naomi had transformed the dining room table at the river house into a full-scale legal operations center. Bank statements, real estate blueprints, and corporate registration documents lay scattered beneath the chandelier.
Julian snapped his laptop shut with an aggressive click. "Lydia wasn't lying. Detective Reyes executed an emergency search warrant on her downtown apartment thirty minutes ago. They found the lockbox under the floorboards."
"And the contents?" I asked, pacing beside the window overlooking the dark woods.
"A certified courier slip from a biochemical lab outside Zurich," Julian said, his eyes burning with controlled fury. "Addressed to Lydia Vance, sent from the personal account of Victoria Vance-Holloway. And there was something else inside: a signed proxy statement dated yesterday morning."
Naomi looked up from her phone. "Victoria isn't in Switzerland anymore. I ran a flight manifest check through my contacts at the regional aviation authority. A private Gulfstream registered to an offshore charter company landed at the county executive airstrip two hours ago."
The air in the room grew heavy. She had come to claim the carcass of our family herself.
"She’s here to attend the emergency shareholder summit at nine o'clock tomorrow morning," Julian deduced, pulling a thick binder from his briefcase. "Before Grandfather died, he inserted an obscure clause into the family bylaws: if fifty percent of the voting shares are contested or frozen by legal dispute, any surviving direct sibling of the patriarch holding at least twenty-five percent proxy can convene an emergency tribunal to dissolve the family corporation and auction its underlying assets."
"And with Lydia in jail and my shares tied up in probate verification, Victoria holds the single largest active voting block," I realized, a sickening chill running down my spine.
"She doesn't want the land to develop it," Naomi murmured. "She wants to sell it to Red Oak’s international creditors to liquidate ninety million dollars in offshore liabilities before the federal grand jury indicts her."
"She’s going to strip the Vance name to the bone and flee back to a non-extradition jurisdiction before Reyes can obtain an international red notice," Julian said.
I looked at my reflection in the dark glass of the window. The pale line along my cheekbone seemed to glow under the amber light of the lamp. For months, I had been reactive—defending myself against cocktails thrown across ballrooms, dodging smear campaigns, relying on the slow, ponderous machinery of the law.
Victoria had spent fifteen years orchestrating my family's ruin from a distance, hiding behind fragile masks of sickness and high-society discretion. She expected me to behave like my father: honorable, quiet, and willing to accept defeat to maintain family dignity.
She had forgotten that I was also my grandfather's granddaughter.
"Julian," I said, turning to face him. "What does it take to disqualify an active shareholder proxy during an emergency tribunal?"
Julian looked up, a sharp, dangerous smile slowly spreading across his face. "Proof of unworthiness under Section Twelve of the Vance Charter: evidence of active, intentional sabotage against the trust’s primary beneficiaries."
"We have the courier receipts," I said. "We have Lydia's taped confession. And we have Richard Sterling’s offshore codes."
"It’s not enough to file it electronically," Julian said, his voice dropping into low steel. "The charter states that disqualification evidence must be presented physically in front of the assembled voting quorum before the opening gavel falls."
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"Then we don't wait for the court hearing," I said, picking up my coat. "Tomorrow morning at nine, we walk into that boardroom."
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