Chapter 6 - The Unlisted Caller
The phone kept ringing, its relentless digital tone vibrating through the mahogany desk and up into Elena’s fingertips. She slowly reached out, her hand hovering over the receiver as if touching it might detonate a bomb. Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she lifted the heavy handset to her ear.
"Hello?" she whispered, her voice trembling in the empty room.
"I told you to check the vault, Elena," Julian’s calm, unbothered voice drifted through the line, completely devoid of the panic one would expect from a man recently detained by federal authorities. "Did you find the birth certificate yet? Did you figure out why your father spent his final year liquidating every asset he owned?"
Elena’s grip on the handset tightened until her knuckles turned white. She looked down at the paper in her other hand, the legal seal gleaming under the harsh halogen light.
"You're his son," Elena choked out, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. "My father... he had an affair before he married my mother. You're my half-brother."
A low, humorless chuckle echoed softly through the earpiece. "Half-brother? Oh, Elena, you still don't understand the half of it. Your father didn't just have an affair. He abandoned my mother and me in a Chicago tenement while he built his shipping empire on the backs of our misery. The eighty-two million dollars isn't corporate fraud. It's an inheritance collection, down to the very last cent."
"That doesn't give you the right to destroy my family, to trap me into a sham marriage!" Elena shouted, the long-repressed anger finally breaking through her shock.
"Marriage?" Julian’s tone hardened instantly, dropping all pretense of warmth. "It was never a marriage, Elena. It was collateral. And speaking of collateral, your precious mother isn't resting comfortably in that ambulance like you think she is."
Elena froze. "What did you do to her?"
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"Check the security feed from the hospital parking lot on your laptop," Julian commanded coldly. "Because the federal agent who cuffed me a few minutes ago? He doesn't work for the SEC."
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