Chapter 38 - The master list
Julian Vance spat a mouthful of bloody rain onto the stone, his eyes gleaming with a twisted, manic triumph.
"You think this ends with me?" Vance rasped, his voice rattling in his throat as the agents dragged him to his knees. "I am just a field manager. You destroyed the digital tablet, Maya, but the offshore servers have already initiated the failsafe protocol."
Garrett stepped forward, his eyes burning with fury. "Arthur is dead, Vance. The proxy votes are nullified, and your mercenary unit is either arrested or neutralizing in the woods. You have no leverage left."
"Arthur was an incompetent pawn!" Vance sneered, turning his gaze toward Maya. "Your real father wasn't an innocent oilman who was bullied by banks, Garrett. Forty years ago, Thomas Weston and the board of directors willingly traded his firstborn child to seal a mineral monopoly in the North Sea! Maya wasn't kidnapped by strangers... she was delivered to us by Thomas Weston himself!"
Margaret gasped, her face draining of all color as she stumbled backward. "That's a lie! Thomas spent every waking second searching for our daughter! He had a stroke trying to find her!"
"Check the private safe in the master suite, Mrs. Weston," Vance whispered, blood dripping from his chin. "The handwritten promissory note from 1984 isn't Arthur’s handwriting. It bears Thomas Weston’s personal wax seal. He sacrificed his daughter to build an empire, and he spent twenty years acting like a grieving father so you wouldn't leave him."
Garrett felt a crushing weight crash into his chest. His idolized father, the man whose portrait hung in every corporate office, the man whose legacy Garrett had worked eighty hours a week to defend—a monster?
"He's trying to get into your head, Garrett," Maya said firmly, grabbing her brother’s arm with both hands. "Look at him. He's desperate. He wants to tear this family apart before they throw him into a black site."
Marcus stepped up beside them, his satellite tablet chirping with an urgent incoming transmission from Weston Global’s corporate headquarters in Manhattan.
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"Garrett, we have a catastrophic problem," Marcus said, his voice grim. "The board of directors just called an emergency midnight session without you. Someone just initiated a hostile takeover using a master stock certificate signed thirty minutes ago."
👉 Garrett stared at the screen in disbelief: the signature on the multi-billion-dollar stock transfer wasn't Arthur's, nor was it Thomas Weston's—it was signed by Margaret.
