Chapter 2
I glanced sideways at Julian, raising an eyebrow.
*Creative accounting?*
So that was what this was.
Julian had warned me that his family was controlling, but he hadn’t mentioned that his mother and uncle were the kind of micromanaging penny-pinchers who audited their adult son’s bank accounts. Clearly, Victoria and Arthur had caught wind of Julian’s five-thousand-dollar wire transfer to my checking account on Friday. They probably assumed I was some gold-digging grifter shaking down their golden boy for pocket change, and they were trying to intimidate me into walking away without the back half of my fee.
Classic corporate bully tactic: inflate the stakes, throw around legalistic jargon, and make the contractor feel like they’re committing a crime just by asking to be paid for their labor.
I had dealt with five dozen deadbeat clients just like them. They had bigger houses and better silverware, but underneath the bespoke tailoring, they were just another set of cheapskates trying to dodge a bill.
“Creative accounting is an understatement,” I said, turning my gaze back to Arthur. I didn’t blink. When you’re dealing with clients who try to dispute net-thirty payment terms, eye contact is everything. “I saw the discrepancies in the records from last quarter. You’ve been shuffling assets between secondary entities, hoping nobody would bother to trace the origin. It’s messy, Arthur. And frankly, it’s amateur.”
Arthur’s face drained of what little color it had left. His knuckles went bone-white against the edge of the table.
“The... the secondary entities?” Arthur stammered. “You’ve already mapped the Cayman trusts? But those were held under blind nominee directors. We used three different law firms in Panama to draft the articles of incorporation!”
I frowned slightly, wondering why on earth he was using such dramatic corporate metaphors for what was obviously Julian’s private trust deductions. Rich people loved dressing up their petty family squabbles in offshore nonsense.
“I don’t care if you used five law firms in Antarctica,” I said coldly. “A ledger is a ledger. Money moves from Column A to Column B. You thought you could bury Julian’s legitimate disbursements under generic management fees and pretend the balance didn’t exist? It doesn’t work that way. The paper trail always leads back to the principal.”
Victoria took a sharp, audible breath.
She leaned forward, her pearls clinking softly against the polished wood. Her eyes were fixed on mine with the kind of desperate, predatory intensity usually reserved for a cornered wolf trying to negotiate with a hunter.
“What is your exposure, Miss Vance?” Victoria asked, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “How much of the float are you holding?”
*The float?*
I almost laughed. She was trying to test me with finance jargon to see if I’d get flustered. Typical executive behavior. Throw a few Wall Street terms at the temp and watch her scramble.
“I’m holding exactly what was agreed upon,” I said, keeping my tone deadpan and unyielding. “Not a cent more, not a cent less. But let me be very clear: if the remainder isn’t finalized on schedule, my exposure won’t be the problem. *Yours* will.”
Arthur dropped his fork. It landed with a terrible, ringing *clatter* against his Limoges porcelain plate, rolling off the rim and leaving a smear of hollandaise on the antique tablecloth.
Neither of the footmen moved to pick it up. The entire room seemed to have frozen in carbonite.
Julian’s grip on my knee tightened. I felt his body tense beside me, but when I glanced at his face, he wasn’t angry.
He was staring at me with an expression that was perilously close to shock—and beneath the shock, something far more dangerous. His dark gray eyes were burning with an intensity that had nothing to do with fake-dating and everything to do with a man watching someone set fire to his family’s throne room without breaking a sweat.
“Clara,” Julian murmured, his voice low, vibrating with a rough edge of amusement and disbelief. “You really don't hold back, do you?”
“Why should I?” I whispered back, leaning slightly toward him so the family couldn't see my lips moving. “Your uncle is trying to bluff me out of my contract. I told you on the phone: I don't renegotiate my fee after services have commenced. It’s unprofessional.”
Julian’s lips parted slightly. For a second, he looked entirely baffled, as if trying to translate my words into a language he didn't speak. Then, the corner of his mouth twitched upward into that devastating, reckless grin.
“Right,” he said softly, his thumb continuing its hypnotic, maddening circle on my knee. “Unprofessional. Of course.”
Victoria was watching our whispered exchange like a hawk tracking two vipers in the grass. Her chest was heaving beneath her silk blouse. She reached for her water goblet, took a small sip to steady herself, and set it down with exaggerated care.
“Miss Vance,” Victoria said, adopting the smooth, calibrated tone of a seasoned board chairman entering a crisis summit. “We are reasonable people. The Sterling family has weathered market fluctuations for over a century. We understand the... aggressive tactics of activist funds. But you must understand our position. If your report goes live on Monday morning, the institutional panic will be catastrophic. Our credit facilities will freeze within forty-eight hours.”
I blinked at her.
*Report? Market fluctuations? Credit facilities?*
God, rich people were exhausting. The mental gymnastics they went through just to avoid saying, *‘We don’t want to pay you’* was truly breathtaking. She was trying to make my simple late-fee protocol sound like an international crisis.
“If your credit facilities freeze over ten thousand dollars, Mrs. Sterling,” I said, looking her dead in the eye, “then your family business is far more fragile than you’re letting on.”
Arthur made a sound like a punctured tire.
Victoria’s eyes widened so far I thought her lashes might touch her brows. “Ten... ten thousand?” she breathed, her voice trembling. “You... you’re talking in code. You mean ten *million*. The short position on our debt notes.”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The sheer arrogance of this woman, pretending that a working-class fee was so beneath her notice that she had to append three zeroes to it just to comprehend it.
“I don’t speak in code, Mrs. Sterling,” I snapped, my patience wearing thin. “I speak in plain English. I am talking about the exact, non-negotiable amount that Julian contracted me for. Ten thousand dollars. Plus sixty-four dollars for the round-trip bridge tolls and dry cleaning for this skirt, because your gravel driveway kicked up an obscene amount of dust when the car pulled up.”
Silence descended on the room once more.
It wasn’t just quiet; it was the kind of absolute, vacuum-sealed silence that precedes a volcanic eruption.
Arthur looked at Victoria. Victoria looked at Arthur.
They weren’t laughing. They weren’t scoffing at the sixty-four dollars for dry cleaning.
In fact, Arthur looked even more terrified than he had two minutes ago. He leaned across the table toward Victoria, his voice a frantic, desperate rasp.
“It’s a psychological tactic, Vic,” Arthur hissed under his breath, barely loud enough for the crystal chandeliers to hear. “She’s mocking us. She’s naming an absurdly trivial figure to demonstrate how completely she owns our capital structure. She’s telling us that crushing our entire quarterly liquidity means no more to her than sixty-four dollars in dry cleaning!”
On iPhone, notifications need PulpTale on your Home Screen:
1. Tap the Share button in Safari, then "Add to Home Screen".
2. Open PulpTale from your Home Screen and we'll ask again.
