Chapter 5 - The Unraveling of Sloan
By Friday, Grant’s life was collapsing like a house of cards in a hurricane.
Sterling, Hayes & Croft issued an immediate termination notice, stripping Grant of his partnership and placing his personal assets under a corporate freeze. To avoid immediate federal indictment, Dorothea was forced to liquidate a significant portion of her personal real estate portfolio to reimburse the one point two million dollars Grant had stolen from the firm's escrow account.
Grant was left broke, unemployed, and facing pending criminal charges for financial fraud.
However, one snake remained in the grass: Sloan Vance.
Sloan had remained quietly in the background, keeping her name off the formal court documents while attempting to hold onto the remainder of the Cayman funds that had not yet been recovered by David's legal team.
At 4:00 PM on Saturday, I received a text message from an unknown number:
Meet me at the Bistro on 4th. Alone. Or I transfer the remaining two million out of reach forever. - Sloan.
I showed the message to Reed.
"You're not going alone," Reed said immediately, pulling his coat off the rack.
"She wants to talk to me, Reed," I said, putting my hand on his arm. "She thinks I'm still the quiet, timid girl who sat at the folding table and took her insults. Let her think that."
"I’m sitting in the truck right outside the window," Reed insisted firmly. "With a recording app running on my phone."
Twenty minutes later, I walked into the upscale French bistro downtown. Sloan sat at a corner booth, wearing a cream cashmere sweater—the same shade as the dress she had worn at Dorothea’s house. She was sipping a glass of Chardonnay, her manicured nails tapping impatiently against the marble table.
I sat down opposite her, keeping my coat open over my stomach.
"You think you’re very clever, don't you, Celeste?" Sloan murmured, leaning back, her blue eyes icy and contemptuous. "You dragged Grant through the mud, ruined his reputation, and destroyed his family."
"Grant destroyed his own family, Sloan," I replied calmly. "You just provided the shovel."
Sloan chuckled dryly. "Grant was weak. He was easy to manipulate. He came to my firm six months ago wanting a quick way to hide money from his pregnant wife, and I gave him one. But you... you think you’ve won because his firm fired him?"
She leaned forward, her voice dropping into a low, venomous whisper.
"I still hold the primary administrative keys to the Cayman entity, Celeste," Sloan sneered. "Without my signature, your high-priced lawyer can't touch the remaining two point eight million dollars sitting in that off-shore account. It will stay frozen in legal limbo for ten years while you raise your little bastard alone."
"I see," I said, leaning back against the leather bench. "So you’re holding the money hostage unless I agree to drop the civil fraud charges against you?"
"Precisely," Sloan smiled, taking a slow sip of her wine. "I want a full legal release signed by Monday morning. You take the house and the petty child support Grant can scrape together from his mother, and you leave me out of your divorce filings. Otherwise, that money vanishes into a Swiss vault by midnight."
I looked at her for a long moment, feeling no fear, no anxiety, no anger—only a profound, cold clarity.
"You really don't check your email on weekends, do you, Sloan?" I asked quietly.
Sloan’s smile faltered slightly. "What are you talking about?"
I pulled my phone out of my purse, opened a PDF document, and slid the screen across the marble table toward her.
"At 3:00 PM today," I explained, "the State Bar Ethics Committee officially revoked your license to practice law in Illinois for co-conspiratory asset concealment and financial misconduct. Furthermore, the Department of Financial Crimes served a search warrant on your firm's Chicago office twenty minutes ago."
Sloan’s face went dead white. She snatched the phone, her eyes scanning the official state document, her hands beginning to shake uncontrollably.
"How... how did you..." she stammered, her composure shattering into a thousand pieces.
"You thought Grant was the only one David Vance was investigating?" I asked softly, taking my phone back. "You used your law license to execute money laundering for three other clients over the past two years, Sloan. Grant wasn't your first victim. But I am definitely your last."
Outside the Bistro window, two unmarked police sedans pulled up to the curb. Four plainclothes detectives stepped out, walking directly toward the restaurant entrance.
May you like
Sloan looked out the window, her eyes wide with sheer terror. She looked at me, her lips trembling, unable to form a single word.
"Enjoy your wine, Sloan," I said, standing up from the booth and folding my coat over my belly. "It’s going to be the last good vintage you taste for a very long time."
