Chapter 8 - The Strategy Shift
I didn't go home after the confrontation with Javier. Instead, I spent the morning meeting with Morales Design’s senior project directors, locking down our active municipal bids, and revamping the corporate bylaws. By midday, I had severed all secondary financial access points, freezing every account Javier or Mercedes could potentially touch.
My phone rang continuously—mostly calls from Mercedes’s high-priced legal counsel threatening immediate injunctions, and a few frantic voicemails from Javier begging for a private conversation. I ignored them all.
Instead, I focused on the one person who could verify whether my father’s alleged corruption was an absolute truth or another manipulated narrative spun by the Rivas family: Elena Vance, Victor’s sister and my father’s former head accountant, who had retired to a quiet coastal town near Valencia ten years ago.
I didn't call her. I drove down there myself.
The small whitewashed cottage smelled of salt air and blooming bougainvillea. When Elena opened the door, her eyes widened in surprise, but she didn't look shocked to see me. She had the weary expression of someone who had been waiting for this knock for a decade.
“Come in, Clara,” she said softly, stepping aside. “I figured you’d find out the truth eventually, once the house of cards started to sway.”
We sat at a modest wooden kitchen table while she poured chamomile tea into chipped ceramic mugs.
“Was my father a thief, Elena?” I asked directly, cutting through the pleasantries.
Elena sighed, wrapping her frail hands around her mug. “Your father was a proud man who made one catastrophic mistake. In 2004, the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy. The Rivas family offered capital, but it came with strings attached—illegal zoning manipulation. Your father took the money, built the portfolio, and then tried to cut them out when the scandal broke. He didn't steal their money, Clara. He stole their control.”
She reached into a drawer and pulled out an old, faded envelope, sliding it across the table.
May you like
“Your father spent the last twenty years trying to pay that debt back under the table through Vanguard Holdings,” Elena continued. “Not because he was corrupt, but because Mercedes threatened to ruin you—to take away your college funds, your future, everything—if he didn't keep feeding their failing empire. The fifty percent equity claim isn't legal, Clara. It’s moral leverage. And the only way to break it isn’t by fighting them in court. It’s by exposing the whole rotten foundation so neither of our families can profit from it anymore.”
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