Chapter 5 - The Crossroads
“Let me get this straight,” I said, leaning forward and resting my forearms on the desk. “You want me to take my hard-earned capital, money I earned by working eighteen-hour days in an unheated studio while you called me a liability, and use it to clean up the mess Julian made.”
“It's the only way to keep your mother and me out of prison,” Dad said, his voice cracking. “And to protect the family name.”
“The family name,” I repeated, the irony tasting like ash in my mouth. “The same family name that was used to humiliate me on Thanksgiving? The same name you stripped from me when you handed everything to Julian?”
Dad closed his eyes, accepting the blow without a word. He knew he had no defense left.
“I won't do it,” I said quietly.
Dad’s eyes snapped open, wide with panic. “Liv, you can't—if you let them liquidate, your brother will be indicted, the estate will be seized, and your mother will lose her home. We'll be destitute.”
“No,” I corrected him, standing up from my desk and walking over to the window to look out at the rain-slicked city. “*You* will be destitute. You made your choices, Dad. You built a house of cards on favoritism and fraud, and now it's collapsing.”
Dad sat in silence for a long time, the fight completely drained out of him. He looked like an old man sitting in the ruins of a kingdom he had built with his own hands.
“Is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind?” he asked softly. “Is there nothing left of the daughter I raised?”
I turned back to face him. “The daughter you raised died in that unheated studio five years ago, Dad. The woman standing here is the one you told your friends was a cautionary tale.”
He swallowed hard, slowly pushing himself up using his cane. He walked toward the door, his shoulders slumped under the weight of an inescapable reality. He paused with his hand on the brass handle, looking back one last time.
“You won, Liv,” he whispered. “I hope it feels as cold as you imagined.”
The door clicked shut behind him, leaving me alone in the vast, silent office.
May you like
I stood there for a long moment, watching the rain beat against the glass. I had won. I had beaten them all. But as I looked down at my phone—which was suddenly vibrating with an urgent, unknown notification from Apex's legal department regarding an unexpected injunction filed by Julian's defense team—I realized the war wasn't over.
Julian hadn't surrendered yet. And the final move he was about to make was going to target the one thing I never expected him to touch.
