Chapter 7 - THE SHOWDOWN AT THE MANORI didn’t wait for the federal agents.
I knew where Lorraine was going. She wasn’t fleeing to the airport, and she wasn’t going to her lawyers’ offices. She was going back to my house. The black hard drive was what she had been after all along, and with Ryan in custody, she knew I was the only person left standing between her and the destruction of her family’s empire.
Arthur tried to stop me, but I took my car keys and drove straight back to the Montgomery estate.
When I pulled up the long gravel driveway, the front door of the mansion was wide open, swinging gently in the afternoon wind.
I stepped out of my car, holding my phone in my hand with the emergency system app open. I walked through the front doors into the grand foyer.
The house had been completely ransacked.
Drawers were pulled out of the antique sideboards, paintings were ripped from the walls, and my office door lay off its hinges. Standing in the center of the living room, surrounded by overturned furniture and torn upholstery, was Lorraine.
Beside her stood an older woman with silver hair, wearing an elegant dark wool coat, holding a small silver pistol equipped with a suppressor.
Helen Sokolov.
Lorraine turned to face me. Her hair was messy, her jacket missing, but her face was twisted into the same malicious sneer she had worn in my kitchen twenty-four hours earlier.
“You came back alone,” Lorraine laughed, a sharp, bitter sound. “How pathetic. You really thought you were smart, didn't you, Audrey? Calling the cops on my son? Setting up digital locks?”
“Where is the drive, Audrey?” Helen asked, her voice calm, lethal, raising the suppressed pistol until it was pointed directly at my chest. “Give it to us, and we leave you alive. Refuse, and we take it off your corpse after we burn this place to the ground.”
I stood my ground in the middle of the ruined room. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t tremble.
“You’re too late, Helen,” I said softly.
Lorraine’s sneer faded slightly. “What are you talking about?”
“The hard drive isn’t here,” I said, lifting my phone. “I delivered it to the United States Attorney’s Office thirty minutes ago. The federal court has already issued emergency asset freezing orders on every account tied to Vance & Sterling Holdings, Sokolov Investments, and your private holdings in Zurich.”
Helen’s eyes narrowed. Her finger tightened on the trigger. “Then you die for nothing.”
“Do I?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe. “Look out the window, Lorraine.”
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the living room, four unmarked black SUVs tore up the lawn, spinning gravel and turf into the air. Dozens of heavily armed federal SWAT agents poured out of the vehicles, raising automatic rifles and surrounding the house perimeter.
“FEDERAL AGENTS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS! RAISE YOUR HANDS!” the loudspeakers boomed outside, shattering the quiet of the estate.
Helen froze. She looked at the window, then at Lorraine, then back at me.
“You set a trap,” Helen whispered, horror finally breaking through her cold mask.
“You thought I was the quiet, submissive girl Ryan brought home three years ago,” I said, stepping closer to them despite the gun in Helen’s hand. “You thought because I kept quiet, I was weak. But silence isn’t weakness, Helen. Silence is preparation.”
Helen lowered the gun slightly, realizing that firing a shot now meant instant death from the snipers trained on the living room windows.
Outside, officers kicked through the rear glass doors, rushing into the room with weapons raised.
“DROP THE GUN! ON THE GROUND! NOW!”
Helen slowly lowered the weapon to the floor and raised her hands into the air.
Lorraine fell to her knees among the torn fabric of my furniture, bursting into dry, desperate tears as officers pulled her arms behind her back.
“Audrey! Please!” Lorraine sobbed, looking up at me from the floor, her face pressed against the marble she had boasted her son owned. “We’re family! Talk to them! Ryan loves you! I was just trying to protect my son!”
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I walked past her without looking down.
“Your son is signing his confession right now, Lorraine,” I said as the agents hauled her to her feet. “And you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a place where no one cares who paid for the floor.”
