Caleb’s face drained of color so fast he looked as though his veins had turned to ash. He frantically began punching commands into his phone. “No… no, the balance sheet says it’s there. It says two hundred and twelve million!”
“The balance sheet is a local loop simulator I installed on your phone when you were asleep next to my mother fourteen months ago,” Olivia whispered, a terrible, beautiful smile touching her lips. “The money you just transferred today didn’t come from the company’s legitimate construction reserves, Caleb. It came from the high-yield commercial paper loans you fraudulently secured by forging my signature on the company’s equipment assets last winter.”
Julian’s phone suddenly went black. A single text message appeared on his screen from an unlisted number: FEDERAL LIEN ACTIVE.
“What does that mean?” Eleanor shrieked, grabbing Caleb’s arm, her perfect cream silk dress wrinkling under her claws. “Caleb! What did she do to our money?”
“It means,” Olivia said, stepping around the desk until she stood directly between the two of them, “that you didn’t just steal from me. You used a federally insured financial institution to commit interstate bank fraud. The two hundred million dollars is currently seized by the federal government. And because you just authorized the final transfer from this IP address, you have legally completed the crime of grand larceny and racketeering.”
The heavy double doors of the executive suite didn’t just open; they were slammed back against the wall.
Four individuals in dark blue windbreakers with the yellow bold letters IRS-CID and FBI stepped into the room, followed by two armed Dallas police officers. Behind them walked Arthur Vance—the original compliance attorney for Olivia’s father, holding a thick stack of federal arrest warrants.
“Caleb Vance,” the lead agent announced, pulling a pair of steel handcuffs from his belt. “You are under arrest for wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit grand larceny. Eleanor Vane, you are under arrest as a co-conspirator to the same charges.”
“Olivia!” Eleanor screamed, her voice cracking into a high-pitched, hysterical wail as a female officer grabbed her diamond-encrusted wrists and forced them behind her back. “I am your mother! You can’t do this to me! I gave you life! You vindictive, cold-blooded bitch!”
Olivia walked up to her mother, her face entirely blank, looking down at the woman who had sold her daughter’s happiness for a share of a dead man’s vault.
“When Dad was dying of lung cancer two years ago, Eleanor,” Olivia said softly, “you didn’t come to the hospital once. You told the nurses you were at a spa in Austin, but you were actually in Miami with my husband, spending forty thousand dollars of my father’s medical trust on a rented yacht. You gave me life, Eleanor, but you took his. This is the bill.”
Caleb was slammed onto the oak desk, his face pressed against the polished wood where he had spent two years designing Olivia’s ruin. “Olivia, please!” he choked out, tears finally spilling onto the leather blotter. “We can work this out! I was manipulated! Your mother seduced me! She told me you were going to leave me with nothing anyway! Please don’t do this!”
“I am not doing anything to you, Caleb,” Olivia said, reaching down to pull the Montblanc pen from his trembling hand, placing it back into her blazer pocket. “You built this house of cards yourself. I just waited for the wind to change.”
She watched in absolute, peaceful silence as her husband and her mother were dragged out of the glass tower, their screams of terror fading down the marble hallway until the only sound left was the quiet, clean hum of the air conditioning.
Olivia walked back to the window, looking out over the sprawling, golden expanse of Dallas. For two long years, she had carried the weight of their betrayal like a shroud. But tonight, as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, lighting the sky in a brilliant, blazing fire, the Vane empire belonged entirely to the daughter who had survived the wolves.
