Chapter 5 - THE EMPIRE STRIKES
Monday morning dawned bright and hot in Texas. At exactly 8:00 AM, Brad, Rebecca’s husband, walked into his prestigious law firm expecting to be named a senior partner. Instead, he was called into the managing partner’s office and summarily fired.
I was the firm’s largest client. My retainer paid for the managing partner’s yacht. I had made one condition for my continued business: Brad was to be terminated, blacklisted, and escorted from the building by security.
By 10:00 AM, the bank holding the mortgage on my parents' sprawling Austin estate called my father. The debt, which had been quietly bought by one of my shell companies months ago as a favor to help them with a bad investment, was being called in. Due in full. Immediately.
By noon, Rebecca received a call from the headmistress of Sophie’s elite private school. Their tuition check had bounced—because I had frozen the trust fund I had generously set up for my niece.
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I sat in my office, watching the dominos fall. My phone rang incessantly. My father, my mother, Brad, Rebecca. I ignored them all. I was not doing this out of blind rage. I was doing this with surgical precision. They had wanted to protect their image and their wealth over a battered five-year-old girl. So, I took away the wealth. The image would be next.
At 2:00 PM, the police knocked on Rebecca’s door, armed with Dr. Aris’s medical report and the eighteen-second video I had anonymously forwarded to the local precinct.
