Chapter 3 - THE FALL OF THE QUEEN"That's a lie!" Victoria shrieked, her voice cracking as her polished facade utterly dissolved. She lunged forward, trying to slap the memory card out of Agent Vance's hand. "That's a fabricated smear campaign! Prove it! You have no evidence!"
"Actually, Mrs. Sterling, we have everything," I said, my raspy voice cutting cleanly through the chaos.
With agonizing effort, I pushed myself up from the wheelchair, gripping my bruised ribs and using the armrests for support. My punctured lung burned with every breath, but I stood on my own two feet, looking down the length of the marble hall straight into Victoria’s horrified eyes.
"You spent six months forging custody papers, freezing my accounts, and paying off crooked judges," I said, taking a slow, painful step forward. "You thought because I was a grieving widow with broken bones, I couldn't fight back."
Victoria backed away, her breathing turning shallow and rapid. "You're... you're a nobody. A low-level analyst—"
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"A forensic data analyst," I corrected her sharply, stopping ten feet away. "Specializing in unrecoverable encryption and hidden offshore ledgers. Do you really think Daniel didn't know what you were doing to his father's trust?"
Daniel had known. And before his car was forced off that mountain road, he had copied every single illicit transaction, recorded every bribery phone call, and hidden the master archive inside the hollow wooden train he carved with his own hands for Noah.
