Chapter 6 - The Counterstrike
While I was quietly buying up his debt, Michael was desperately trying to find a way out of his financial death spiral.
Stripped of his access to my bank accounts, he couldn't secure a bank loan. Desperate to cover the ten-million-dollar payment due on Monday, Michael and Margaret made a fatal mistake: they reached out to Victor Thorne, a notorious hard-money lender with deep ties to shady offshore networks.
On Saturday afternoon, my head of security, Arthur Vance, showed me photographs taken by our surveillance team outside a high-end restaurant in Bel-Air.
The pictures showed Michael and Margaret sitting with Victor Thorne, signing a stack of legal documents over lunch.
"Michael just took a ten-million-dollar emergency loan from Thorne at twenty-four percent interest," Vance reported. "He put up his personal shares in his shell companies and his future inheritance as collateral."
"He doesn't have an inheritance," I said dryly.
"He doesn't know that," Vance chuckled. "He thinks your father's original trust still has money in it. But Margaret liquidated that trust back in 2019 to buy her house in Palm Springs."
"So Michael just signed a deal with a loan shark using nonexistent collateral," I said, shaking my head at my brother's sheer stupidity. "What about Ashley?"
"Ashley is currently trying to sell off her jewelry collection to private buyers in Beverly Hills," Vance said. "She took five high-end watches and three diamond necklaces to an auction house this morning. But we had already registered the serial numbers with the International Gemological Institute as stolen assets. The auction house confiscated the items and called the police."
"Was she arrested?"
"Not yet," Vance replied. "The DA wants to sweep them all up together on Monday when the grand jury hands down the formal fraud indictments. They want a clean, air-tight case."
That evening, as Emily and I were having dinner in our dining room—now clean, quiet, and restored to its original beauty—my phone rang.
It was my mother. She was calling from a burner phone.
I set the phone on the table and put it on speaker so Emily could hear.
"Daniel?" Margaret’s voice came through, high-pitched and hysterical. "Daniel, please answer me! You have to help us!"
"I'm listening, Margaret," I said coldly.
"Michael is in terrible trouble!" she sobbed. "Some dangerous people are threatening to take everything from him if he doesn't pay ten million dollars by Monday! Daniel, he's your brother! You can't let these thugs hurt him!"
"Michael brought those people into his life himself," I replied. "Just like you brought chaos into mine."
"We are your family!" she screamed, her fake tears disappearing, replaced by her raw, ugly entitlement. "You owe us! I gave birth to you! I suffered for years raising you! You owe me every dollar you have! If you don't wire ten million dollars to Michael’s account by tomorrow, I will go to the press! I will tell every newspaper in America that Daniel Cole let his own mother starve on the streets!"
Emily reached over, placed her hand over mine, and looked me in the eye. She gave me a firm, reassuring nod.
I took a deep breath and spoke into the phone.
May you like
"Go to the press, Margaret," I said smoothly. "Tell them everything. But make sure you invite them to the courthouse on Monday morning at 9:00 AM. Because that’s where the District Attorney will be reading your thirty-eight counts of felony fraud to the public."
I ended the call before she could scream again.
