Chapter 6 - The Fallout of Glass
The digital notification pinged through the car’s Bluetooth system just as I crossed the Baltimore county line. It wasn't an email from Chloe or a text from a federal investigator. It was a direct calendar invite from Arthur Vance himself, sent to my corporate address with the subject line: We need to talk about the family ledger.
I didn't tap to open it. I let the chime ring out into the empty cabin of the car, the rain drumming a steady, heavy beat against the roof.
By sending that invite, Vance was signaling that he knew the SEC enforcement package had been dispatched. He knew his shell companies were freezing, and he knew that my father’s name was sitting right on the front page of the evidentiary exhibits. He was attempting the only move left to a man whose corporate survival depended on intimidation: a face-to-face sit-down, away from the lawyers, away from the federal magistrates, and right back on the ground where he thought he still held the cards.
When I walked through the security gates of Aster Vale Holdings the next morning, the atmosphere on the thirty-second floor had shifted from controlled efficiency to hyper-focused tension. Chloe intercepted me before I even reached my office door, her arms full of tablet devices and legal briefs.
"Arthur Vance’s legal counsel filed an emergency injunction an hour ago," Chloe said, walking briskly beside me down the glass corridor. "They’re trying to block the asset seizure on the grounds that Crestwell’s internal R&D transfers were authorized under a legacy executive privilege clause signed back when your father sat on the regional advisory board."
I stopped walking and turned to look at her. "My father never sat on Crestwell’s advisory board. He was a regional procurement auditor for independent logistics contracts. He had no authority to sign off on R&D intellectual property transfers."
"Vance’s legal team is claiming otherwise," Chloe said, handing me a digital stylus. "They submitted a signed affidavit bearing an authorization stamp from 2018. The signature on the document is Arthur Carter."
The words felt like a physical chill in the room.
My father. Not just a passive participant whose dormant retirement corporation was used as a pass-through, but a signatory on the very corporate loophole Vance was using to shield his embezzlement scheme.
"Pull up the metadata on that affidavit," I ordered, walking into my office and throwing my briefcase onto the leather sofa. "If that signature is from 2018, check the digital fingerprint against the software versioning logs we pulled during the initial acquisition review. No manual signature from that year matches the biometric tracking standards our compliance software uses."
"I've already run a preliminary check," Chloe said, her expression grim. "The signature was digitized. It was lifted from an old procurement sign-off sheet your father filed when he retired—and pasted onto the R&D transfer waiver."
A forgery. Vance hadn't just used my father as a shield; he had framed him to take the criminal fall if the audit ever blew wide open.
Before I could answer, my desk phone lit up with a direct internal line.
May you like
"Ms. Carter," the receptionist said, her voice tight. "There's someone in the ground-floor lobby insisting on seeing you. It’s not Vance. It’s your sister Rosie."
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