PART 2: THE RECKONING BEGINS
For three seconds, Adrian just stared at me. Then he let out a harsh, bitter bark of laughter, shaking his head as if I had spoken in a foreign language.
“Your father?” Adrian sneered, turning to glance at Vanessa. “The small-town hardware manager who couldn’t even afford to attend our wedding?”
Vanessa giggled, adjusting her diamond bracelet. “Oh, Adrian, let her have her little fantasy. Trauma makes poor people delusional.”
Before the sentence even fully cleared her lips, Adrian’s phone vibrated violently in his pocket. Then it rang again. And again. A sudden storm of ringtones and frantic notification chimes shattered the silence of the marble foyer.
Adrian frowned, pulling out his device. His face shifted from arrogance to mild confusion, then instantly drained into a ghastly, translucent pale.
“What is it, darling?” Vanessa asked, stepping closer to peer over his shoulder.
The screen was a cascading wall of red alerts. His primary credit lines were frozen. His corporate accounts were locked under emergency federal freeze orders.
And then, his board chairman’s name flashed across the screen. Adrian answered with a trembling hand, pressing the phone to his ear.
“Adrian, what the hell did you do?!” the chairman screamed loud enough for the sound to echo off the high ceilings. “The Sterling Global Conglomerate just pulled every single dollar of liquidity from our firm! They bought our debt thirty seconds ago and fired you!”
Adrian dropped the phone. It shattered against the marble floor right next to my pool of blood.
(The true identity of the woman he abused is about to be revealed! Click “Next Page” to continue reading…)
