Chapter 11 - The Inheritance of Dust
The autumn air in Chicago bit with a sharp, metallic edge, but inside my glass-walled office on the forty-fifth floor, the climate was controlled to absolute perfection.
My assistant, a sharp young woman named Maya, placed a thick manila folder on my desk.
“The liquidation of the Mercer estate is complete, Ms. Crest,” Maya reported smoothly. “The Naperville property sold at a judicial auction for sixty cents on the dollar. After settling the primary bank liens and back taxes, there was a net deficit of four hundred thousand dollars.”
I didn’t look up from my spreadsheet. “Who absorbs the deficit?”
“Jason’s personal bankruptcy trustee. Because he signed the secondary indemnity agreements without reading the fine print—the clauses you cleverly embedded into the asset restructuring settlement—the liability falls entirely on him and his mother’s secondary trust.”
I smiled faintly, tracing the edge of my silver pen.
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Eleanor Mercer had spent her entire life protecting a dynasty built on sand, manipulation, and manufactured tragedies. Now, the very trust she had used to engineer my infertility was being bled dry to pay off the legal debts of her disgraced son.
Karma wasn't a passive concept. In finance, as in life, it was simply the inevitable settling of unpaid accounts.
