Chapter 10 - Christian's Desperate Gambit
Desperation makes men stupid, but absolute ruin makes them dangerous.
Christian sat in a rented sedan parked three blocks away from Sienna’s office building. His eyes were wild, dark circles bruising the skin beneath them. He hadn't slept in seventy-two hours. The criminal summons was sitting on his dashboard like a ticking bomb.
He knew that once he walked into that courthouse on Friday, his life was over. Between the forensic paper trail and David Vance’s aggressive filings, he was looking at five to ten years in state prison.
There was only one way out: he needed Sienna to withdraw the complaints. And he was going to make her do it.
At 7:15 PM, Sienna walked out of the Apex Global executive entrance toward the private parking garage. The garage was dimly lit, quiet, the hum of the ventilation shafts providing a steady background drone.
She unlocked her Porsche with her key fob.
Before she could open the driver's side door, a figure stepped out from behind a concrete pillar.
"Sienna."
Sienna paused. She didn't drop her keys. She didn't scream. She turned slowly, her posture rigid, her eyes taking in the pathetic, unkempt wreck of a man standing before her.
"You're violating the protective order, Christian," she said, her hand slipping calmly into her pocket where her emergency panic transmitter rested. "The police are already tracking my vehicle's perimeter. You have about three minutes before this garage is swarming with patrol cars."
Christian pulled something out of his jacket pocket.
It wasn't a weapon. It was a thick, yellowed envelope.
"You won't call them," Christian rasped, stepping forward, his hands trembling violently. "Not until you see what's in here."
Sienna didn't move. "I don't care about whatever pathetic leverage you think you found."
"It's about your father's company," Christian whispered, a desperate, feral grin stretching across his cracked lips. "Apex Global didn't just recruit you out of graduate school, Sienna. Your father was a founding equity partner in the original firm twenty-five years ago. And when he died... Gwen’s first husband, Arthur Vance, and the board buried his shares."
Sienna’s heart skipped a single, violent beat.
Her father had died in an unexpected private plane crash when she was nineteen. She had grown up believing he had lost his assets in the dot-com crash, which was why she had clawed her way up from the bottom on scholarships and corporate grit.
"You're lying," she said coldly.
"My mother kept the original partnership ledgers in her safe deposit box for twenty years," Christian said, shaking the envelope. "My father was the corporate attorney who drafted the shell transfers that erased your father’s name from the apex equity cap table! Arthur Vance didn't promote you because you're brilliant, Sienna! He promoted you to keep you close, to control you, so you would never look into the founding trust!"
Sienna stared at the yellowed envelope.
"Give it to me," she said.
May you like
"Sign the withdrawal of the criminal charges," Christian demanded, his voice cracking with hysteria. "Sign the property settlement giving me half the Scottsdale house, and I hand you the documents that prove you own thirty percent of Apex Global. Refuse... and I burn them right now. You’ll spend the rest of your life as an employee for the men who robbed your dead father."
***
