Chapter 27 - The Unraveling
Victoria backed up a step, her heel catching on the metal lip of the boarding stair. She looked frantically toward Julian.
"Julian!" she commanded, her voice shrieking like torn sheet metal. "Julian, tell them! Tell them Charlotte had a breakdown! Tell them she set the fire to frame me! Julian, look at me! I am your mother!"
Julian stood ten paces back, his shoulders slumping, his face buried in shadow. For the first time in his thirty-two years of existence, he did not rush forward to soothe her. He did not fetch her water. He did not bow his head.
"I gave the state troopers the dashcam footage from the driveway, Mom," Julian whispered, his voice trembling but clear. "The camera recorded you carrying the five-gallon fuel jugs into the cellar. It recorded you padlocking the exterior cellar storm doors from the outside. It’s over."
Victoria lunged toward him, her manicured fingers clawed like talons, but two state troopers stepped forward instantly, catching her by the arms and twisting them behind her back.
*Click-clack.*
The cold steel of standard-issue handcuffs snapped around her slender, jewel-encrusted wrists.
"Take your hands off me!" Victoria screamed, writhing violently against the officers’ grip, her composure entirely shattered. "Do you know who I am? George! Tell them! George, you spineless bastard, tell them who I am!"
George Vance walked forward slowly. He looked down at the woman he had loved, feared, and enabled for nearly half a century.
"I know exactly who you are, Victoria," George said softly. "You are an embezzler, an arsonist, and an attempted murderer. And as of midnight tonight, by virtue of the corporate emergency bylaws you forced me to sign five years ago, your shares in Vance Enterprises are completely frozen."
"You can't do that!" she spat, a spray of saliva flying from her lips. "I built that company! I made you! Without me, you're nothing! You hear me? Nothing!"
"The company was never ours to begin with," George replied quietly.
He turned toward me, reached into his suit pocket, and produced the original brass seal of Vance Enterprises—the heavy signet stamp used to execute master deeds.
"Charlotte," George said, his voice thick with tears, offering the seal to me with both hands. "Your grandfather built the engines that powered this entire empire. My father stole them with your mother-in-law's forged paperwork. The Vance name is finished. The board belongs to you."
Victoria watched in mute horror as I accepted the heavy brass seal.
"Get her into the cruiser," Arthur Pendelton ordered coldly.
May you like
As they dragged Victoria Vance across the tarmac, her designer shoes dragging through the oily puddles, her screams faded into the steady whine of the rain, until the heavy door of the police car slammed shut, cutting her off from the world she had tried so desperately to rule.
***
