Chapter 37 - The Collateral Trap
I slammed the phone onto the desk.
"Julian," I hissed through my teeth.
I didn't wait. I marched back down the west gallery, through the kitchen, and down into the stone basement where my private security team had locked Julian Vance in the wine cellar before handing him over to the local marshals.
The heavy steel door swung open with a screech.
Julian was sitting on a wooden crate, holding a stained napkin to his bleeding lip. He looked up at me with terror in his eyes.
"Clara! I swear, I didn't know about Vanessa's fake pregnancy—"
I grabbed him by the lapels of his ripped coat and slammed his skull back against the stone wall. The bottles of vintage Bordeaux rattled in their racks.
"The Caspian notes, Julian," I said, my voice barely above a whisper, vibrating with lethal intent. "Tell me what you signed with the Geneva syndicate, or I swear to God I will open those storm doors and let the federal marshals tell the Caspian operators where you’re hiding."
Julian’s face turned from pale to grey. He began to hyperventilate. "I... I had to, Clara! They said it was the only way to get the leverage to buy out your board seats! Helena's men... they brought the papers to my hotel in London three months ago!"
"How much?"
"Two... two point four billion," he stammered, tears spilling over his bruised cheeks. "They said it was guaranteed by the Sterling legacy! They told me if I defaulted, the children’s trusts would assume the debt, and the syndicate would take legal wardship under the Swiss Hague exception!"
I let go of his coat. He crumpled to the floor like a sack of damp flour.
*Wardship.*
They weren't trying to steal my money. They were trying to manufacture a legal avenue to take Christian and Maya out of American jurisdiction permanently, using an unpayable sovereign debt to strip me of maternal custody under international treaty law.
Helena hadn't come to Highwood to kidnap them with tactical teams. That had been a diversion to establish federal jurisdiction and force the deployment of emergency protective orders.
The true attack was paper. It had always been paper.
"Clara, please," Julian wept, clutching my boots. "I didn't know they would take the kids! They told me it was just a corporate buyout! They said you’d get fifty million and you’d move to California!"
I looked down at the man who had shared my life, who had held my hand in the delivery room, who had traded our children’s lives for a corporate title and a mistress who faked a pregnancy.
"You are going to prison for twenty-five years, Julian," I said softly. "And every single day you spend in that federal penitentiary, you will wake up knowing that you were the small, pathetic tool used to forge your own destruction."
I turned on my heel and walked out, locking the steel door behind me.
May you like
"Briggs," I said into my radio. "Get the jet ready. We’re going to Geneva."
***
