“You heard your sister, Evelyn,” Eleanor said calmly, adjusting her tone back to a business-like demand. “The bag was a hundred and fifty, but there’s a twenty-thousand-dollar international armored transport fee we have to pay before they release it from the vault. Transfer twenty grand to Chloe’s checking account right now. They’re holding up the champagne toast.”
“Mom… please,” I whispered, my voice breaking. I was begging. I was on my knees, pleading for the life of my child. “He is your grandson. He is going to die if I don’t get that chopper in the air. Please, tell the auction house you made a mistake. Tell them to reverse the charge. Get the funds released.”
“Evelyn, enough!” Eleanor snapped, her voice suddenly turning icy, cruel, and completely devoid of humanity. “He is not my grandson. He is an orphan you picked up from a group home because you couldn’t manage to find a husband. He’s just adopted. If the worst happens, you can just get another one. Now, stop ruining our trip, stop being selfish, and wire the twenty thousand dollars so Chloe doesn’t look like a pathetic peasant in front of this Count.”
Click. She hung up on me.
I slowly lowered the phone from my ear. I stood in the freezing, sterile-smelling clinic, staring blankly at the frost creeping up the windowpanes.
Something inside my chest snapped. It wasn’t a slow, gentle unraveling. It was the sharp, definitive, violent crack of a steel cable snapping under immense pressure. The lifelong ache to be loved by the women who shared my DNA, the desperate need to buy their affection, evaporated into the freezing Alaskan air.
I looked at Julian. His eyes were rolling back. I didn’t have time to cry.
The desperate, weeping daughter vanished. In her place, a cold, calculating architect of absolute ruin emerged.
I didn’t pace the room. I didn’t scream at the walls. I became a digital financial assassin.
I opened my private wealth management portal. Bypassing the drained joint account, I went straight to my primary, restricted assets. I selected a high-yield stock portfolio and immediately executed a rapid, penalty-heavy liquidation of sixty thousand dollars. Taking the massive tax hit didn’t matter. It would take ten minutes to clear into my checking account.
While I waited for my own money to clear to save my son, I turned my attention to the parasites in Paris.
Alaska is nine hours behind Paris. It was 5:00 PM in the clinic, which meant it was 2:00 AM in France. The perfect time for an ambush.
I opened the transfer portal. I selected Chloe’s linked external account. She wanted money for her luxury transport fee. She demanded I fund her billionaire-chasing masquerade.
My thumbs flew across the digital keyboard with absolute, icy precision.
Amount: $1.00.
