Chapter 3 - When the Golden Boy Bleeds
At 6:15 AM, the triplex penthouse at 56 Leonard Street was supposed to be waking up to the gentle hum of an integrated automated espresso bar and the quiet rustle of the *Financial Times* being ironed by the domestic staff.
Instead, Vance Sterling was standing in the middle of his sprawling, minimalist living room in his silk pajama bottoms, screaming into his iPhone loud enough to vibrate the floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking Lower Manhattan.
“What do you mean the wire was rejected?” Vance roared, running a hand through his unwashed hair. “I am Vance Sterling! I am the Chairman and CEO of Apex Future Technologies! The funds were guaranteed by the Kensington Trust! Execute the transfer!”
On the other end of the line, a weary, stone-faced senior compliance officer from Blackstone-Crest spoke with the flat, mechanical indifference of a guillotine blade dropping.
*“Mr. Sterling, as of 3:42 AM, the legal division of Blackstone-Crest received a formal affidavit of non-authorization and identity theft executed by Sloan Kensington. The collateral backing the twenty-four-million-dollar facility has been revoked. Furthermore, because fraudulent documentation was submitted under your corporate profile, our risk management committee has declared your enterprise account in technical default. You have twenty-four hours to cure the outstanding interim advances of four point two million dollars, or we will initiate immediate asset seizure.”*
“Wait! Listen to me!” Vance panicked, his voice cracking into an ugly, desperate falsetto. “There’s been an administrative error! My wife—she’s having a postpartum nervous breakdown! She didn't know what she was signing! Let me get her on the phone, we can fix this in five minutes—”
*“The file has been transferred to external legal counsel, Mr. Sterling. Do not contact this desk again.”*
The line went dead.
Vance stared at the darkened phone screen, his chest heaving, cold sweat soaking through the collar of his designer pajamas.
Four point two million dollars.
He had already spent three million of the preliminary advances. One million had gone toward the non-refundable deposit for their new private jet lease; eight hundred thousand had gone to pay off Apex’s overdue AWS cloud hosting bills; and another six hundred thousand had been quietly wired to Julian Croft’s offshore account in the Cayman Islands to purchase the waterfront villa Vivien had been demanding in Saint Barthélemy.
He had less than one hundred and forty thousand dollars left in Apex’s operational treasury.
If the market opened and the payroll processors attempted to pull the bi-monthly employee salaries at 9:00 AM, the transfers would bounce. Over two hundred engineers, product managers, and executives would discover that the hottest AI tech company in the Silicon Alley was stone-cold broke.
The heavy walnut front door of the penthouse suddenly slammed open.
“Vance!”
Beatrice Sterling swept into the foyer like a storm of expensive beige cashmere and neurotic outrage. At sixty-two, his mother spent a fortune on cosmetic dermatologists to maintain the appearance of a woman who had never experienced an inconvenient emotion, but right now, her face was mottled with red, and her pearls were swinging wildly.
Behind her trailed Harper, wearing an oversized Balenciaga hoodie, her mascara smeared across her cheekbones, clutching a miniature French bulldog to her chest.
“Mom? Harper? What the hell are you doing here?” Vance yelled, clutching his temples. “Do you have any idea what kind of disaster I’m dealing with?”
“What kind of disaster *you* are dealing with?” Beatrice shrieked, slamming her Birkin bag down onto the marble kitchen island with enough force to scratch the stone. “I was escorted out of the Carlyle Spa this morning like a common shoplifter! The front desk informed me that my primary medical and wellness card was canceled by the master account holder! They demanded a physical credit card for eighteen thousand dollars in back treatments! When I handed them my secondary Black Card, it was declined! Declined, Vance!”
“My doorman wouldn't let me upstairs!” Harper wailed, collapsing onto the imported Italian sofa and kicking off her sneakers. “He said the lease guarantee was terminated at midnight! There were two moving guys from the building management putting padlocks on my storage unit! They treated me like a criminal! Where is Sloan? Tell her to pick up her damn phone and fix this!”
Vance’s vision swam. “Sloan hasn't come home.”
Beatrice gasped, one manicured hand flying to her throat. “What do you mean she hasn't come home? Where is my granddaughter? Where is that selfish little girl?”
“She took Ara to the hospital last night,” Vance muttered, pacing back and forth across the hardwood. “Ara had a fever. Sloan started making a scene over the phone because I couldn't leave the Hudson Yards mixer with Vivien.”
Harper rolled her eyes so hard she nearly groaned. “Are you serious? Ara gets a sniffle and Sloan shuts down our credit cards? What kind of psycho bitch does that? Mom needs her blood filtration treatments this week, Vance! And I have an influencer event in the Hamptons on Friday! If my Soho loft is locked, where am I supposed to put my clothes?”
“Shut up! Both of you, shut up!” Vance screamed, spinning on them with his teeth bared. “You don’t understand! She didn't just cancel your discretionary cards! She revoked the Kensington trust guarantee on the Blackstone bridge loan! She flagged my signature as forgery!”
The room went dead silent.
Even Harper stopped stroking her dog.
Beatrice’s face drained of color. For all her aristocratic posturing, Beatrice knew exactly where their lavish lifestyle came from. Vance’s late father had died leaving behind mountains of debt and a hollow family name. It was Sloan Kensington’s generational trust fund that had purchased this triplex penthouse. It was Sloan’s trust that had paid off Beatrice’s third mortgage on the Southampton estate. It was Sloan’s personal balance sheet that allowed Vance to walk through the world pretending to be a self-made tech messiah.
“Forgery?” Beatrice whispered, her voice finally losing its arrogant edge. “Vance... you didn't forge her name on an institutional contract, did you?”
“I had to!” Vance shouted defensively, his hands flailing. “The Series C investors were stalling! Vivien’s brother needed his consulting payout cleared before the end of the quarter! I was going to replace the funds as soon as the public valuation hit four hundred million! Sloan was never supposed to find out!”
“Well, she found out, darling,” a silky, purring voice drifted from the top of the floating glass staircase.
Vivien Croft descended the steps with slow, feline elegance. She was wearing one of Sloan’s silk robes—an ivory La Perla kimono that Vance had gifted his wife three anniversaries ago. Her blond hair fell in effortless waves around her shoulders, and a diamond tennis bracelet glittered on her wrist.
Mason was still upstairs, presumably playing with the high-end gaming consoles Vance had purchased for him.
“Vivien,” Vance sighed, running toward her like a beaten dog seeking comfort. “Thank God you’re awake. It’s an absolute disaster. Sloan has gone completely rogue.”
Vivien did not reach out to touch him. She stopped on the bottom step, looking down at the Sterling family with cool, clinical detachment.
“I heard,” Vivien said, adjusting the belt of the silk robe. “I also received a notification from my brother ten minutes ago. His offshore account was hit with an administrative hold by the correspondent clearing bank in New York. The monthly retainer Apex sent him yesterday has been frozen under suspicion of corporate embezzlement.”
Vance blinked. “What? How can they freeze Julian’s account?”
“Because your wife didn't just call the credit card company, Vance,” Vivien said, her tone devoid of the warmth and sultry adoration she had showered him with on the terrace the night before. “Julian ran a trace on the freeze order. The compliance directive was signed by Marcus Vance—the chief legal predator for the Moretti syndicate.”
The name fell into the penthouse like a dead body dropped from a helicopter.
Beatrice collapsed onto an armchair, clutching her chest. “Moretti? Oh, sweet merciful God... Vance, what have you done? The Morettis? Those people are monsters! They bury people under the harbor docks!”
“That’s ridiculous!” Vance stammered, though his knees visibly shook. “Apex doesn't do business with the Morettis! Blackstone-Crest is a standard private equity group!”
“Blackstone-Crest is Dante Moretti’s private money-laundering machine, you idiot,” Vivien snapped, her eyes narrowing into slits of pure, venomous disgust. “Julian told you that six months ago! He told you to tread carefully with their paper!”
“You told me to take the loan!” Vance screamed at her. “You said Julian had connections at Blackstone! You said your brother could smooth over the audit controls!”
“I assumed you had control over your own wife!” Vivien hissed back, taking a step toward him. “I assumed the woman who gave up her entire career to change your daughter’s diapers was as pathetic and pliable as you said she was! You told me Sloan was an empty shell who signed whatever paper you put in front of her! You told me she worshipped you!”
“She did!” Vance shouted, his face burning with humiliation in front of his mother and sister. “She’s been doing everything I told her to do for six years! She never checks the master accounts! She never looks at the corporate ledger!”
“Well, she looked,” Vivien said coldly, crossing her arms over her chest. “And now my brother is facing an international wire fraud audit because your little domestic slave decided to grow a spine.”
“Don’t you dare speak to Vance that way!” Beatrice interrupted, finding her voice again through her trembling terror. “My son made you! He gave you that penthouse suite in Tribeca! He gave your brother millions! You’re nothing but a glorified social climber!”
“And you’re an aging parasite living off your daughter-in-law’s dead grandfather,” Vivien fired back, not even looking at the older woman. “At least I provide a return on investment.”
“Enough!” Vance roared, clutching his head between his hands. The sheer cacophony of their screaming was ripping his sanity apart.
He looked at his mother crying over her spa treatments, his sister whining about her Soho clothes, and his mistress calculating her exit strategy before the ship slipped beneath the waves.
None of them cared about him. None of them cared about Apex.
For six years, whenever a crisis arose—whenever a contract fell through, whenever a payroll tax deadline was missed, whenever an investor threatened to pull out—Vance had never had to deal with the terror.
He had simply walked into the nursery or the study, dropped the files on Sloan’s desk, looked into her eyes with wounded, puppy-dog helplessness, and said, *“Sloan, sweetheart... I don’t know what to do. Can you look at this?”*
And Sloan had fixed it. Every single time.
She had stayed up until four in the morning rewriting the algorithms. She had drafted the legal addendums. She had called her old contacts at Goldman and Morgan Stanley to smooth over the liquidity crunches. She had borne the crushing weight of the world on her shoulders and handed him back the glory on a silver platter.
“I have to find her,” Vance breathed, his eyes wide and vacant.
“What?” Harper asked, sniffling.
“I have to find Sloan,” Vance said, rushing toward his dressing room to find a suit. “She’s at Mount Sinai with Ara. She’s just angry. She’s hurt because of the fireworks. It’s an emotional tantrum. If I go down there, apologize, hold Ara, and tell Sloan that I’ll cut off Vivien and put her back in charge of the household, she’ll drop the injunction. She always forgives me. She loves Ara too much to destroy our family.”
Vivien let out a harsh, mocking laugh from the staircase. “Good luck with that, golden boy. Because if Dante Moretti is already holding her hand, you’re not walking into a reconciliation. You’re walking into an abattoir.”
Vance ignored her. He threw on his bespoke charcoal suit—the very coat Ara had recognized under the fireworks—grabbed his car keys, and sprinted for the private elevator.
May you like
He was Vance Sterling. He had raised two hundred million dollars on the power of his smile and his silver tongue. He was not going to let an exhausted, neglected housewife take his empire away from him.
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