Chapter 6 - The Stroke of the Pen
The broken intercom sparked once, hissing a faint dying current into the silence of the fortified foyer, while the shattered plastic lay like powdered bone beneath my boots.
I looked down at Naomi. Her hand steady, she held out the heavy manila folder and the gold-plated fountain pen as if presenting me with an instrument of execution rather than a legal document. The page resting on top was the amended guardianship agreement—the very instrument Arthur and Patrick Sloane had designed to legally assassinate my rights as a father and hand my children over to a boarding school in Vermont.
Arthur was still curled on the cold marble, wheezing like a punctured lung, his silk tie soaked in his own sweat and the dust of the shattered glass wall.
“Sign it, Roman,” Arthur choked out, blood smearing his chin as he tried to claw an inch backward. “Sign it and let us walk... Patrick will leave your ports alone... I swear to God—”
I didn't look at him. I took the heavy gold pen from Naomi’s fingers, uncapped it with a sharp, metallic click, and knelt down beside my trembling attorney.
“You wanted my signature, Arthur?” I whispered, pressing the cold nib of the pen directly against the center of the guardianship document, right across the line designated for Legal Guardian and Custodial Trustee.
“Yes... yes, right there—” Arthur sobbed, reaching a trembling hand out.
I didn't sign my name.
Instead, I drove the gold nib straight down through the paper, burying the tip deep into the expensive mahogany leather binding of Arthur’s dropped briefcase beneath it, tearing a jagged, vicious hole right through the entire stack of fraudulent court filings.
Arthur screamed, flinching as if I had stabbed him instead of the paper.
“That’s my signature, Arthur,” I said, my voice dangerously low. “Consider it legally binding.”
Camille let out a choked, hysterical sob from her corner against the elevator doors, her manicured fingers clawing uselessly at the closed steel panels.
Before Arthur could pull his hand back, Naomi’s phone—still clutched tightly in her palm—chirped with a sharp, high-pitched notification sound.
She glanced down at the screen, her face going instantly pale.
May you like
“Roman,” Naomi said, her voice tight with sudden, freezing panic. “The perimeter sensors on the ground floor just tripped. It’s not the federal marshals.”
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