Chapter 4 - The Rat in the Corner
By noon the following day, the financial world was in an absolute frenzy.
Headline news across every major financial network broadcast the scandal:
VANCE TECHNOLOGIES CEO FIRED ON STAGE AFTER DRAMATIC EMBEZZLEMENT AND DOMESTIC ASSAULT EXPOSURE.
The company's stock dipped slightly in early trading, but rebounded rapidly after Chairman Arthur Vance publicly announced that he was stepping back into the role of Executive Chairman, with myself appointed as the interim Chief Legal Officer to oversee corporate restructuring.
Meanwhile, Julian was drowning.
He was forced out of our penthouse apartment in Hudson Yards—a property owned entirely by my family trust. He was forced to check into a mid-tier airport hotel, using a personal credit card that had barely enough limit left to cover three nights.
At 2:00 PM, Julian met Sienna in a secluded booth at a noisy diner near Queens.
Sienna looked furious. Her hair was unstyled, her designer handbag was gone, and she was frantically scrolling through her phone.
"My bank accounts are locked, Julian!" Sienna hissed across the table, slamming her phone down. "The apartment manager just told me my keycard doesn't work! All my clothes, my bags, my jewelry—everything is inside that penthouse!"
"Shut up, Sienna!" Julian snapped, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. "I'm facing federal embezzlement charges! The District Attorney’s office called my lawyer an hour ago! If I can't raise two million dollars to repay the company expenses by Friday, I'm going to state prison!"
"Well, do something!" Sienna cried out. "You promised me we were going to rule that company together! You said Clara was a clueless nobody who would just take a settlement and walk away!"
"I didn't know her father was Arthur Vance!" Julian yelled, causing several diners nearby to look over in alarm. He lowered his voice, his eyes darting around frantically. "She lied to me for eight years... she set me up."
"So what are we going to do?" Sienna asked, her voice dropping into a desperate whisper. "We can't just go to jail!"
Julian’s expression darkened into something sinister. A slow, toxic grin spread across his face as he reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a small, encrypted USB drive he had managed to slip out of his office desk before security escorted him out.
"Clara thinks she won," Julian sneered, tapping the metal drive against the formica table. "She thinks she can destroy my life and walk away as the heroic heiress."
"What's on that drive?" Sienna asked, her eyes widening.
"The proprietary source code for Vance Technologies' new AI defense contract," Julian revealed, his voice laced with venom. "It's worth fifty million dollars on the black market. I was keeping it as leverage just in case Arthur ever tried to push me out."
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He leaned across the table, his eyes burning with desperate malice.
"Contact the Vane Syndicate in Brooklyn," Julian commanded. "Tell them I have the keys to Vance Technologies' kingdom. And I want ten million dollars in cash by tomorrow night."
