The Collapse of Victoria
Chapter 07 - The Collapse of Victoria
By five o'clock that afternoon, federal agents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, accompanied by local police officers, raided my parents’ luxury penthouse in Gold Coast and their private medical offices.
Truckloads of financial documents, server hard drives, and private safes were seized as evidence.
While my father sat in an interrogation room at the federal building facing charges of grand embezzlement and wire fraud, Victoria and her father, Arthur Vance, were frantically trying to save their own real estate firm from crumbling.
I sat in Marcus Vance’s corner office on the 50th floor, watching a live news broadcast showing federal agents carrying boxes out of my parents’ home.
Suddenly, the office door was pushed open.
Victoria walked inside. She was no longer wearing her white designer wedding dress; she wore a rumpled coat, her hair disheveled, her eyes swollen with frantic, manic panic.
Two security guards tried to grab her arms, but I gestured for them to stand down.
“Leave us,” I instructed the guards.
Victoria rushed up to my desk, slamming her designer handbag onto the glass surface.
“Evelyn! Please!” Victoria cried out, throwing her hands up in desperate plea. “You have to stop the federal investigators! They’re freezing my father’s development accounts! We had nothing to do with Richard’s embezzlement!”
I leaned back in my leather chair, looking at the woman who had helped my brother frame my eight-year-old daughter forty-eight hours ago.
“You stood in that ballroom, Victoria,” I said, my voice cold and unyielding. “You slipped a phone into an eight-year-old girl’s pocket. You called her a thief in front of two hundred people. And you watched your husband hit her with a wooden board without saying a single word.”
“Preston forced me to do it!” Victoria lied frantically, tears pouring down her cheeks. “He told me if I didn't help him frame you, he’d cancel the wedding! I was terrified of him! I’m a victim too, Evelyn!”
I picked up my desk phone, tapped a button, and played an audio recording that Marcus Vance had recovered from Preston’s encrypted cloud server two hours ago.
Victoria’s voice echoed clearly through the office speaker:
“Preston, make sure you put the phone in the brat’s denim jacket before the band starts playing. Once your parents threaten her with child protective services, Evelyn will sign over those corporate shares in ten minutes flat.”
Victoria’s voice froze in her throat. Her face turned translucent as she realized her own recorded words had just buried her last remaining lie.
“That audio file was handed over to the District Attorney thirty minutes ago, Victoria,” I revealed coolly. “You aren't a victim. You’re an accomplice to felony child abuse and corporate extortion.”
“Evelyn... please...” Victoria whimpered, dropping to her knees beside my desk, clutching her hands together. “I’ll give you whatever you want! I’ll divorce Preston! I’ll testify against him in court! Just don't let them put me in prison!”
I stood up, walked around my desk, and looked down at her with complete, uncompromising disgust.
“You cared more about an ivory aisle runner than an eight-year-old girl’s life,” I said softly. “You can tell your story to the judge.”
Two uniformed police officers stepped into the office, grabbing Victoria by her arms and pulling her up from the floor.
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“Victoria Vance, you are under arrest for conspiracy, evidence tampering, and filing a false police report,” the officer stated, snapping steel handcuffs around her wrists.
Victoria screamed and thrashed as she was dragged out of the building, her multi-million-dollar high-society life ending in complete, public disgrace.
