Chapter 5 - Unraveling the Web
By two o'clock in the morning, the Grand Horizon ballroom was an empty cavern of discarded napkins, half-empty champagne flutes, and scattered floral arrangements. But five miles away, inside the penthouse boardroom of Grand Horizon’s corporate tower in Century City, every single light was blazing.
I sat at the head of the twenty-seat black granite conference table.
My emerald gown had been replaced by a sharply tailored charcoal-gray wool suit from Ralph Lauren, my hair pulled back into a severe ponytail. On the table before me sat a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea, three open laptops, and stacks of manila folders labeled with the crests of five separate European banking institutions.
Marcus Vance sat to my right, his reading glasses perched on his nose, reviewing the emergency injunctions he had drafted over the last four hours. Luke sat to my left, his fingers flying across his keyboard at dizzying speed, running decryption algorithms against the private server Brenda had tried to wipe from her apartment.
The heavy mahogany doors of the boardroom were shoved open with violent force.
Christopher stormed in.
His tuxedo jacket was gone. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, drenched in sweat, his sleeves rolled up in frantic disarray. Two private security guards stationed outside the boardroom moved to block his path, but I raised one hand, signaling them to stand down.
“Vivian!” Christopher bellowed, slamming his palm down against the far end of the granite table. The sound cracked like a gunshot through the room. “Have you completely lost your mind?! Do you have any idea what you’ve done tonight?! Grand Horizon stock dropped thirty-four percent in after-hours trading in Tokyo! Thirty-four percent! We have lost two billion dollars in market capitalization before the New York Stock Exchange has even opened!”
I didn't blink. I took a slow, measured sip of my tea, set the porcelain cup back onto its saucer, and looked at him down the length of the long table.
“Correction, Christopher,” I said calmly. “*You* lost two billion dollars in market capitalization. Grand Horizon’s stock will recover the moment the market learns that the cancer at the top has been surgically removed.”
Christopher let out a manic, strangled laugh. “Surgically removed? Are you delusional?! I am the Chief Executive Officer! I am the face of this firm! Without me, the sovereign wealth funds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi will pull their credit facilities by sunrise!”
“They already have,” Luke spoke up, not looking up from his screen.
Christopher froze, his eyes darting toward our son. “What did you say?”
Luke turned his laptop around, displaying a series of incoming SWIFT notifications and encrypted communications.
“Sheikh Al-Mansoor’s private investment office sent a formal notification at twelve forty-five AM,” Luke said, his voice flat and clinical. “They have exercised the moral turpitude clause under Section 14 of the secondary partnership agreement. They have frozen their seven-hundred-million-dollar liquidity line and demanded immediate confirmation that all operational authority has been transferred to the original estate trustees. Namely: Mom.”
Christopher staggered back two steps, his hand clutching his chest as if he had been struck with a physical blow. “No... no, that's impossible. Al-Mansoor is my personal friend. I played golf with him in Dubai last month—”
“He’s not your friend, Christopher,” I interrupted, my voice slicing through his panic. “He’s an investor. And investors do not leave their capital in the hands of a man whose mistress is currently being processed in a Beverly Hills county holding cell on charges of attempted poisoning and grand larceny.”
“She framed me!” Christopher screamed, his voice rising to an unstable, cracking pitch. He rounded the table, rushing toward where I sat, but Marcus Vance stood up immediately, placing his tall, formidable frame between Christopher and my chair.
“Step back, Mr. Albright,” Marcus said, his voice deep, gravelly, and carrying forty years of courtroom intimidation. “You take one more step toward Mrs. Albright, and the protective order currently sitting on Judge Harrison's desk will be executed immediately. You will spend the rest of the night in a cell adjacent to Miss Vance.”
Christopher stopped, his chest heaving, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles turned white.
“Vivian,” he pleaded, shifting tactics in an instant, his voice dropping into the smooth, manipulative purr he had used to deceive me for twenty years. “Listen to me. Please. Look at me. We built this company together. We’ve been together since we were twenty-five. Brenda was... she was a temporary weakness. An infatuation. A stupid, reckless mistake! She preyed on my vanity! You were working so hard on the foundation, you were distant, you were always tired... and she was there. She orchestrated everything! She told me you were seeing someone else! She showed me fake text messages from your former business partner!”
Luke let out a cold, short laugh. “Those fake messages? Brenda paid an offshore hacker three thousand dollars to generate them. And do you know what credit card she used to pay him, Dad?”
Luke pressed a key on his keyboard.
The laser printer at the corner of the boardroom whirred to life, spitting out a single sheet of paper. Luke picked it up and held it out for his father to see.
“She used your private corporate card,” Luke said. “And you signed off on the expense report under *Client Entertainment Services*. You didn't even read the receipt. You were so eager to believe Mom was unfaithful—so eager to justify your own pathetic, disgusting betrayal—that you handed Brenda the very rope she used to hang you.”
Christopher looked at the paper, his eyes wide and bloodshot. The realization of how completely he had been played by Brenda, how thoroughly he had engineered his own downfall, seemed to crash over him all at once.
He sank down into an empty leather executive chair, his head dropping into his hands.
“What do you want, Vivian?” he mumbled into his palms, his voice muffled, defeated, and broken. “What do you want from me?”
I opened the manila folder sitting directly in front of me.
“I want what was always mine,” I said.
I slid the documents down the table. They came to rest against his trembling elbows.
“That is an emergency petition for absolute divorce on the grounds of fraud, adultery, and domestic endangerment,” I told him. “Attached to it is a full voluntary surrender of all your executive titles, your board seat, and your voting shares in Grand Horizon Group.”
Christopher lifted his head, his eyes flashing with a desperate, dying defiance. “Surrender my shares? Never. My shares represent forty percent of this company! You can’t force me out! A CEO cannot be removed without a supermajority vote of the board of directors!”
“Then you had better check your calendar, Christopher,” I replied with a cold, triumphant smile.
I tapped the screen of my tablet.
May you like
“Because the emergency board meeting convenes in precisely five hours. And you are going to find out that a man with frozen bank accounts and an impending federal indictment doesn't have many friends left in Century City.”
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