Chapter 3 - THE HOUSE OF CARDS COLLAPSES"You're bluffing," Victor spat, his face turning the color of a bruised plum as he stood up, his bulk pressing against the edge of the table. "Daniel, you've lost your mind. The stress of the legitimate transition has broken your judgment. We are your blood! We built this family on loyalty, not on the whim of some American architect you picked up off a construction site!"
"Loyalty," Daniel repeated, the word tasting like ash in his mouth.
He straightened up and clicked a small silver remote in his palm.
Instantly, the recessed lighting along the vaulted ceiling flickered, and the massive motorized projection screen descended over the north wall of the dining room—the wall traditionally reserved for portraits of the Han patriarchs.
Instead of ancestral paintings, high-definition audio waveforms and financial ledgers blazed across the white canvas.
Click.
An audio recording began to play through the mansion’s integrated surround-sound system.
"Make sure the truck hits the driver's side at sixty miles per hour," Victor’s unmistakable voice boomed through the speakers, crystal clear in the high-ceilinged room. "If he survives the impact, Sun-hee has the secondary directive ready. Once the shares revert to the board under the emergency succession clause, we liquidate the waterfront project and split the municipal contracts with the Yamaguchi syndicate."
A collective gasp sucked the air out of the room. Several of the younger cousins turned pale, sliding their chairs back toward the perimeter walls as if distancing themselves from a bomb with a live timer.
Marcus lunged forward, grabbing a heavy silver champagne bucket to hurl at the screen, but before his fingers could wrap around the metal, two armed guards in black tactical gear—men Evelyn had never seen inside the house before—stepped out from the velvet draperies and pinned Marcus’s arms behind his back with a sickening crunch of shoulder joints.
"Get your hands off me! Do you know who my father is?" Marcus screamed, his face pressed flat against the mahogany table.
"I know exactly who his father is," a cool, composed voice drifted from the doorway.
All heads turned.
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Evelyn walked into the dining room. She had changed out of her burgundy dress. In its place, she wore a tailored charcoal-grey pantsuit—the uniform she wore when she walked multi-million-dollar job sites and stared down corrupt city inspectors. Her hair was pulled back into a sleek, severe knot, and in her hand, she carried the thick cream envelope Grace had given her.
She didn't look like an outcast anymore. She looked like an executioner.
