Chapter 26 - The Unholy Alliance
The revelation hit me not with a shock, but with the sickening clarity of a puzzle piece sliding into place.
Ricardo’s sudden, reckless arrogance. Camilla’s absolute fearlessness when she stood in my kitchen in Monterrey. The way Alexander looked at her—not as a daughter-in-law, but as the vessel for his genetic continuation. Ricardo wasn't the mastermind, nor was he the father. He was the cuckolded pawn, paid in corporate titles and offshore scraps to be the public face of a dynasty Alexander couldn't father under his own legal name without exposing his faked death.
"He used Ricardo as a surrogate husband to hide the pregnancy until he was ready to return," I whispered, the rage inside me cooling into a lethal, crystal-clear resolve. "And Ricardo took the money and the title because he's too pathetic to care whose child it is."
"What do we do?" Sofia asked, her face pale. "They have the Swiss courts on their side. The banking commission already approved the transfer."
"The Swiss care about two things, Sofia," I said, stepping away from the velvet drape and walking toward the emergency exit stairs. "Legitimacy and solvency. My father thinks he’s checkmated me because he’s playing with the money he hid in 2016."
"Isn't he?"
"No," I replied, pulling my phone from my pocket and dialing a direct, biometric line to a private vault in Singapore. "Because while he was playing dead in the Alps, I spent eight years routing the root-level intellectual property of every vessel, every shipping lane, and every automated cargo terminal into a single, proprietary ledger."
The line connected on the first ring.
"Good morning, Director Vance," an automated voice spoke from the receiver.
"Authorize Operation Scorched Horizon," I said coldly. "Kill the encryption keys for every Vance Global maritime vessel currently at sea. Drop the transponders. Lock the automated port gates from Rotterdam to Singapore. Shut the empire down."
"Confirm authorization: Victoria Vance, sole surviving director?"
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"Confirmed," I said. "Shut it all down. Let's see how much my father’s bearer bonds are worth when his global supply chain goes completely dark."
***
