Chapter 22 - Blood Money and Buried Sins
The corporate jet sliced through the Atlantic turbulence at forty-five thousand feet. Inside the soundproofed cabin, the only light emanated from three ultra-wide monitors displaying the financial autopsy of Vance Global.
Every wire transfer my father had initiated forty minutes ago pointed toward an account structure that shouldn't have existed. It was an archaic financial labyrinth—accounts established in 1994, under code names drawn from Dante’s *Inferno*. The Limbo Trust. The Malebolge Holdings.
"He never left the helm," I muttered, swirling three fingers of neat bourbon without tasting it. "He didn't hand me an empire. He handed me a sandbox while he retained the master keys."
"Look at this, Victoria," Sofia said, leaning over my shoulder. She pulled up a sealed manifest from the 2016 plane crash recovery team. "The recovery was handled exclusively by a private Swiss maritime salvage outfit called Cerberus Tactical. Their board of directors is completely anonymous. But look at the funding line."
I leaned in, my pulse hammering behind my temples. "Ricardo’s family trust."
"Not his family," Sofia corrected, pulling up a notarized document with an offshore stamp from the Cayman Islands. "Ricardo's father was an executive VP at Vance Global thirty years ago. He was disgraced, publicly stripped of his stock options, and sent into obscurity. Alexander orchestrated Ricardo’s entire trajectory. He placed Ricardo at the Harvard Business School alumni gala where you 'accidentally' met him seven years ago."
The glass in my hand shattered. The bourbon pooled across the mahogany table, soaking into the pristine white leather of the flight log. I didn't flinch as a sharp shard of crystal bit into my palm, drawing a bead of crimson.
The humiliation, the years of trying to be the perfect corporate wife, the hollow excuses Ricardo made when he stayed out late, the disgusting spectacle of Camilla parading her ultrasound on Instagram—it was all an audition script written by my own father.
Alexander Vance had chosen a weak, narcissistic coward to infiltrate my life, waiting to see if I would collapse into victimhood or skin the traitor alive.
"He wanted a successor who was as ruthless as he was," I whispered, watching my blood drip onto the flight map directly over the Swiss Alps. "He thought I was soft because I let my mother die in a hospice instead of fighting her cancer with illegal clinical trials. He thought I had a conscience."
I wrapped a linen napkin around my bleeding hand, pulling the knot tight with my teeth.
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"Sofia," I said, staring at the flashing red telemetry dot nearing the Zurich airspace. "Call our head of forensic intelligence in Geneva. Tell him to assemble a tactical breach team. We aren't going to the corporate office. We're going to Saint Moritz."
***
