Chapter 4 - The House of Cards Collapses
At 4:00 PM precisely, my cell phone began to vibrate violently against the polished mahogany surface of my office desk. It was Vance. I let it ring out to voicemail. It buzzed again immediately. Then a third time.
By the fourth call, I calmly picked up the receiver and tapped the speakerphone button.
"Sloan! What the hell did you do?!" Vance’s voice shrieked through the speaker, cracking with raw, unmitigated panic. In the background, I could hear Loretta wailing hysterically like a siren, shouting frantic demands about blocked credit cards and rejected debit transactions at the grocery store.
"Do?" I asked innocently, flipping a page in my report. "I'm just sitting at my desk, Vance. Doing my 'little paycheck' job."
"Don't play games with me!" he roared, breathing heavily. "I just tried to pull company payroll for my firm, and the accounts are locked! The bank says there’s a federal freeze order tied to personal asset dissipation, and—and our home equity line has been seized by corporate lien! What have you done to our accounts?"
"Your accounts, Vance," I corrected softly. "Remember? I’m just a freeloader who makes a little paycheck. I don't know anything about complex banking injunctions."
"Sloan, stop!" His voice dropped from enraged shouting to desperate, pathetic pleading. "Please! Mom is having a panic attack! The grocery store card just declined at the register, and the credit card company says our personal reserves are wiped out! How are we supposed to pay the mortgage? How are we going to survive?"
"Well," I mused, letting out a soft, melodic sigh. "Times are tight with this inflation, you understand. Cooking in excess and throwing perfectly good money in the trash is a terrible sin. Maybe you should calculate every penny."
Silence stretched across the phone line for three full seconds. The color drained from his metaphorical face as he finally realized where those exact words had come from.
"You... you recorded that," he whispered, horror dawning in his throat.
"I remember every single word," I replied, my tone hardening into steel. "Every insult. Every calculated humiliation. Every single dollar you stole from our joint savings to fund your mother’s extravagant lifestyle while she forced me to eat dried rice at the bottom of a barren cooker. You thought you could erase me from the title of this house? You thought you could treat me like a domestic servant while picking my pocket? You are looking at a masterclass in financial forensics, Vance. And your lesson is just getting started."
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Before he could sputter another syllable of excuse, I terminated the call, blocked his number, and forwarded the entire evidence file—including the forged power of attorney, the bank routing numbers, and the corporate debt default notices—straight to the Cook County Financial Crimes Bureau.
The house of cards they built on deceit wasn't just collapsing. It was being bulldozed flat.
