Chapter 2 - The Morning After
I stared at the phone as Grant’s arrogant threat hung heavily in the quiet room.
My father calmly reached forward and ended the call without speaking a single syllable.
He looked at me and explained that a cornered rat will always try to bite.
I asked him if the shipping manifests Grant mentioned were genuinely dangerous to our family.
My father poured himself a drink and admitted that the documents contained sensitive international trade secrets.
If those files were leaked to the federal government, the Vance logistics empire would face devastating fines.
I felt a sickening wave of guilt for bringing this danger to my father's doorstep.
He placed a strong, reassuring hand on my shoulder and told me to never apologize for surviving a monster.
I was escorted to my old bedroom, where I slept exhaustedly for the first time in forty-eight hours.
When I woke up the next morning, the bright Texas sun was shining through the massive windows.
The physical pain in my jaw was duller, but my determination to ruin Grant was razor sharp.
I dressed in a tailored white suit that my father’s staff had perfectly prepared for me.
I walked downstairs to the dining room and found my father surrounded by high-level corporate attorneys.
They were methodically dismantling Grant’s professional life piece by piece.
His primary investors had all pulled their funding after receiving anonymous tips about his massive gambling debts.
His credit cards were universally declined when he tried to buy his mistress breakfast at a luxury hotel.
I smiled, imagining the look of absolute humiliation on Vanessa’s face.
The board of directors at Grant’s tech company had just scheduled an emergency meeting to vote on his immediate termination.
We were winning the war much faster than I had anticipated.
My cracked phone suddenly buzzed on the mahogany table with an incoming call from an unknown number.
I answered it cautiously, expecting to hear my husband shouting more empty threats.
Instead, a woman was sobbing hysterically on the other end of the line.
It was Vanessa Cole.
She begged me to help her and swore that she had made a terrible mistake.
She claimed that Grant had violently attacked her this morning when his credit cards failed.
I felt a brief flicker of pity, but I reminded her that she had smiled while he threw me into the storm.
Vanessa wept and said she had something that would destroy Grant’s leverage against my father.
She possessed a hidden audio recording of Grant confessing to orchestrating a massive corporate fraud scheme.
I told her I was listening and asked where she was hiding.
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Vanessa whispered a hotel room number before the line went completely dead.
I heard the unmistakable sound of a heavy wooden door being kicked open just before the call disconnected.
