Chapter 17 - The Confrontation in the VaultWe didn't call the police. Not yet. If Robert caught wind of a police dispatch before the final transaction lock was verified by federal regulators, he would shred the physical hard drives in his office vault—destroying the only surviving evidence linking him to my mother’s death and my father’s poisoning.
We slipped into the downtown corporate tower through the underground delivery bay, moving silently through the darkened corridors of the executive suite on the twelfth floor.
The door to Uncle Robert’s sprawling corner office was cracked open. A warm, yellow sliver of light spilled out onto the plush carpet.
We crept up to the doorway. Inside, Uncle Robert stood by his mahogany executive desk, wearing a crisp silver suit, casually dropping documents into a roaring electronic paper shredder. A heavy steel floor safe stood open behind him, stuffed with stacks of bearer bonds and passport folders.
"You always were entirely too much like your father, Alexander," Robert said smoothly, without turning around. He didn't even sound surprised. "Emotional, impulsive, and completely blind to the real game."
I stepped into the office, the floorboards groaning beneath my boots. "How could you do it, Robert? You watched Maya and Marcus get dragged away in handcuffs. You watched my father suffer a stroke. And you just sat there."
Robert turned slowly, a calm, chilling smile playing across his lips. He picked up a gold fountain pen—the exact same pen my grandfather had left him decades ago—and slid it into his breast pocket.
"Business is war, my boy," Robert said smoothly, taking a sip of scotch from a crystal tumbler. "Your father built this company on old-fashioned sentimentality. I built it into a machine. When Maya got too greedy and threatened to expose our offshore accounts to save her own skin, I simply let her hang herself. Just like I let your little ex-wife take the fall three years ago."
Lucy stepped past me into the light, her eyes burning with an unholy fury. "You murdered my career. You drove my mother to her grave."
Robert chuckled, a cold, dismissive sound. "My dear, collateral damage is simply the cost of doing business. And right now, you two trespassing in my office constitutes a very expensive mistake."
He reached casually behind his desk, his hand hovering over a concealed security alarm button.
Before his finger could press down, my father rolled his wheelchair swiftly into the doorway, blocking the exit. With a burst of adrenaline and fierce, unyielding strength, my father picked up a heavy bronze paperweight from a side table and hurled it across the room.
Crash!
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The heavy bronze sphere shattered Robert’s crystal tumbler, sending glass and amber scotch flying across the desk and interrupting his reach.
Lucy didn't hesitate. She vaulted across the mahogany desk like a striking panther, tackling Robert to the plush carpet just as his finger slammed harmlessly against the wooden molding.
