The Twentieth Turn

With Chloe and Veronica neutralized and the board thoroughly broken into submission, I turned my attention to the final piece of the puzzle: my mother’s personal safe.

For ten years, my father had insisted the safe in the basement archive was empty, broken, or locked forever. But according to the original trust documentation I recovered from Marcus Vance’s office, the archive contained something far more valuable than stocks or bonds.

It contained the truth about my mother’s death.

Midnight. The archive room was located in the sub-basement of the estate, far away from the glittering penthouses and city lights. The air smelled of old paper, dust, and cold concrete.

I turned the brass combination lock using the six-digit sequence my mother had left hidden inside the lining of her childhood journal.

*Click.*

The heavy steel door swung open.

Inside sat a single leather-bound box. I pulled it out, carrying it over to the metal desk under the harsh overhead fluorescent light. I flipped the brass latch and opened the lid.

Inside were medical records, bank statements, and hand-written letters from my mother, dated just weeks before her fatal car accident ten years ago.

As I read through the pages, the blood in my veins turned to ice.

It wasn't an accident.

The brake lines of my mother’s car had been deliberately severed. The repair receipts, the insurance fraud payouts, and the wire transfers had been routed through an offshore account controlled jointly by Veronica... and my father.

They hadn't just pushed me out of the family after her death. They had murdered her to seize control of the trust prematurely, only to find out that my mother’s legal safeguards had locked the funds away until my twentieth birthday.

They had spent ten years waiting for me to turn twenty, assuming they could manipulate me, marry me off, or break my spirit before the clock ran out.