Chapter 7
I stared at him.
*Department of Justice?*
I looked at Julian, who was still standing beside me, his shoulder pressed firmly against mine. Julian’s mouth was pressed into a tight, hard line, trying—and failing—to suppress what looked like absolute, ecstatic delight. Underneath the sleeve of his jacket, his forearm flexed, his hand remaining locked around mine, warm and steady.
“Mr. Croft,” I said, pulling my attention back to the silver-haired lawyer. “I don’t know what kind of criminal investigations you usually manage, but my records are entirely above-board. Everything is filed quarterly under Schedule C. If you’re trying to imply that my lack of designer labels is an illegal tax avoidance scheme, you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s called living within your means.”
Croft smiled. It was the cold, bloodless smirk of a shark smelling chum.
“Fascinating narrative,” Croft said, lifting a thick sheaf of parchment bound with a heavy blue ribbon from his briefcase. “You maintain the cover even in private settlement chambers. Julian, you truly found an exceptional asset. It’s a pity she overplayed her hand.”
He dropped the document onto the desk. The heavy paper hit the leather blotter with a solid, authoritative *thwack*.
“What is that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“That,” Croft said, leaning forward and resting his knuckles on the desk, “is an Omnibus Restructuring and Non-Disclosure Surrender Stipulation. It is ironclad. It is irrevocable. And it is the only thing standing between you and a federal grand jury indictment for market manipulation and corporate extortion.”
Beside me, Julian’s entire demeanor shifted.
The teasing warmth vanished in an instant. Julian didn’t just tense; he stepped forward, placing his broad shoulder directly in front of mine, shielding half my body with his own. The casual billionaire playboy was gone, replaced by a man radiating pure, lethal hostility.
“Watch your mouth, Vance,” Julian said. His voice was quiet, dangerously low, vibrating with an icy authority that made the hairs on my neck stand up. “You are the family’s general counsel. You are paid out of the primary operating budget. If you utter one more veiled threat toward Clara, I will have your retainer revoked before the ink dries on that blotter.”
Croft didn’t back down, though his jaw tightened at Julian’s tone.
“Julian, I have represented your father’s interests since before you were conceived,” Croft countered, his voice hard. “I understand you have grievances with the family trust. I understand your resistance to the van der Bilt alliance. But bringing an outside executioner into the primary residence? Providing her with non-public material disclosures to coordinate a targeted short assault on the Sterling debt facilities? That is treason against your own blood. It is an SEC violation of the highest order. And I will not allow this... this mercenary to dismantle sixty years of family enterprise for a personal vendetta.”
I blinked, processing his dramatic, multi-syllabic tirade.
*Mercenary? Targeted short assault? Providing non-public material disclosures?*
It finally clicked.
I looked at the legal document on the desk, then at Croft, then at Uncle Arthur, who was sweating into his silk handkerchief.
They weren’t just trying to avoid paying Julian’s contractual bill. They were trying to frame me for corporate espionage to cover up Julian’s unauthorized spending!
Julian had hired me without his mother’s permission. He had promised me ten thousand dollars out of his trust fund to act as his buffer. And because his overbearing, controlling family monitored every penny that left his accounts, they had caught the five-thousand-dollar initial transfer and immediately called in their top-dollar family fixer to intimidate the hired temp into silence.
They thought that by threatening me with fake legal jargon—claiming that Julian sharing his personal schedule and family issues with me was an “insider trading breach”—they could force me to sign an omnibus surrender document that would void Julian’s debt to me completely.
They wanted to seize my itemized records. They wanted to confiscate my notes. They wanted to bury the fact that Julian owed an hourly worker five thousand dollars, thirty-two dollars in bridge tolls, and thirty-two dollars in dry cleaning.
*Wage theft,* I thought, a cold, incandescent fury igniting in my chest. *The oldest, dirtiest corporate game in the book.*
They thought because they wore bespoke wool and I wore polyester, I would tremble at the mention of a grand jury. They thought because they had an antique desk and a silver-haired shark, an independent contractor would fold, drop her claims, and walk away with an empty bank account.
They clearly didn’t know who they were dealing with.
I gently touched Julian’s forearm, signaling him to step aside. He looked down at me, his gray eyes dark with protective rage, his jaw locked tight.
“Clara, you don’t have to listen to this bastard,” Julian murmured, his thumb brushing against my wrist, his pulse hammering against my skin. “I’ll handle Croft. I’ll call my own independent counsel right now.”
“I don’t need your counsel, Julian,” I said calmly, looking up into his eyes. “I know my rights. And unlike your family, I don’t hide behind retainers.”
I stepped past him, planting myself directly in front of Vance Croft.
I picked up the thick blue-ribboned document, flipped to the first page, and read the introductory clauses out loud with blistering, sarcastic precision.
“‘The Undersigned Party agrees to immediately relinquish all digital storage media, including but not limited to flash drives, encrypted hardware, mirrored servers, and secondary physical ledgers, containing proprietary audit details regarding the Sterling entities,’” I read, my voice ringing clear and steady off the mahogany bookshelves.
I flipped to page four.
“‘The Undersigned Party further covenants that any scheduled public filings, administrative disclosures, or regulatory transmissions shall be immediately recalled, deactivated, and permanently purged from all automated dispatch networks, under penalty of liquidated damages amounting to twenty-five million dollars.’”
I dropped the document back onto the walnut desk. It landed with a dry, dismissive slap.
“You want my flash drive?” I asked, leaning forward, resting both hands on the edge of the leather blotter.
Croft’s eyes narrowed into slits. “We require the physical hardware, Miss Vance. Along with the master decryption key for the cloud repository holding the forensic debt audit. And we require it before two-forty-five.”
“My ‘physical hardware’ is an eight-gigabyte SanDisk thumb drive shaped like a cartoon penguin that I bought at a Duane Reade on Fourteenth Street for seven dollars and ninety-nine cents,” I said flatly.
Victoria gasped softly. Arthur’s eyes bugged out.
“A... a novelty drive?” Arthur squeaked, clutching his chest. “She hid the Cayman trust shell routing codes on a toy penguin? It’s brilliant. Completely undetectable by airport security!”
I ignored him. I didn't have time for Arthur’s bizarre, melodramatic delusions.
“On that thumb drive,” I continued, locking eyes with Croft, “is my itemized mileage tracking sheet. Julian’s travel reimbursement breakdown. A scanned copy of the dry-cleaning receipt from the laundromat on Avenue B. And the precise, timestamped log of the emotional and administrative labor I have performed since eight o’clock on Thursday evening.”
Croft didn’t blink. “You can call your extortion dossier whatever mundane corporate euphemisms you prefer, Miss Vance. The law does not recognize semantic camouflage. That drive contains proprietary data derived from Julian’s insider access. You intend to transmit that file to federal authorities at three o’clock to collapse our market capitalization.”
