Chapter 10 - The December Deadline
By seven o’clock on Christmas night, the snow had transformed Georgetown into a postcard of 18th-century winter elegance.
Gas lamps flickered against the heavy brick facades of O Street. Wreaths with red velvet ribbons hung from black wrought-iron gates. Expensive sedans and town cars crunched through the fresh powder, ferrying the cream of Washington society—senators, ambassadors, prominent lobbyists, and old-money matriarchs—to their holiday celebrations.
A sleek black Lincoln town car pulled up to the curb outside 1422 O Street.
Inside sat Senator Thomas Sterling and his wife, wearing black-tie attire. Behind them, two other luxury vehicles idled in the street, hazard lights blinking against the swirling snow.
For forty years, Christmas night at the Prescott house was the premier invitation-only event for the Georgetown old guard. The annual Prescott Christmas Gala. Margaret had mailed out the hand-engraved invitations three months ago.
The car doors opened. Guests in fur coats and tuxedo overcoats stepped out onto the sidewalk, laughing, clutching bottles of vintage champagne and wrapped silver gift boxes.
They walked up the stone steps toward the grand double doors of 1422 O Street.
There was no light in the transom.
There was no Christmas tree glowing in the front bay window.
There was only a bright, yellow police tape stretched diagonally across the entrance, flapping violently in the freezing wind, and an official white legal notice stapled directly into the historic mahogany doorframe:
*NOTICE OF VACATION AND CORPORATE ASSET SEIZURE*
*MERCER CREST HOLDINGS, LLC*
*TRESPASSERS WILL BE ARRESTED AND PROSECUTED UNDER D.C. CODE § 22-3302*
Below it hung a second document, stamped with the red seal of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department:
*CRIMINAL ARREST WARRANT ISSUED: JILLIAN PRESCOTT — FELONY CHILD ABUSE (D.C. CODE § 22-1101)*
The guests stood frozen on the sidewalk, their murmurs of amusement instantly turning into gasps of horror and disbelief.
Suddenly, the front door cracked open.
Margaret Prescott appeared in the doorway.
The socialites gasped. Margaret wasn't wearing her emerald velvet gown. She was wrapped in three dirty, mismatched woolen blankets pulled from the back of an old storage closet. Her face was smudged with soot from an attempt to light the fireplace without kindling, her silver hair was a wild, bird's-nest tangle, and her teeth were chattering so hard they made a rhythmic, clicking sound.
Beside her, Jillian sat on the bare, unvarnished floorboards of the empty foyer, clutching an old bottle of cooking sherry, sobbing hysterically in the dark, freezing hallway.
*"Margaret?"* Senator Sterling’s wife whispered, lifting her silk skirts back from the snowy step. *"What... what happened here?"*
Margaret looked at her peers—the very people she had spent forty years trying to impress, the people before whom she had ridiculed me as a common country girl—and her face twisted into a mask of pure, unhinged madness.
*"Vanessa!"* Margaret screamed into the cold night air, pointing a trembling, dirt-caked finger at the empty street. *"That monster stole everything! She took the chairs! She took the art! She had my Derek locked in a cage! She took the heat! Don't look at me! DON'T LOOK AT ME!"*
Margaret slammed the heavy oak door shut. The deadbolt rattled, but the latch didn't hold.
Down the street, two police cruisers turned the corner, their blue lights flashing against the snow, responding to the automated silent alarm Marcus Vance had set to trigger whenever an unauthorized occupant breached the interior of Mercer Crest property.
The high-society guests scrambled back into their town cars, doors slamming in panicked succession, their drivers speeding away through the slush to avoid being associated with the grotesque public humiliation of the Prescott family.
***
Across the city, high above the falling snow in Rachel’s penthouse, the scene was entirely different.
The living room was warm, smelling of rich hot cocoa and roasted pine. Chloe was fast asleep on the oversized sectional, her little hand resting peacefully under her cheek. The purple bruise on her face was still there, but her expression was serene, untroubled by the storm raging outside.
I stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass window, looking out over the glowing grid of Washington, holding a glass of mineral water.
Behind me, Marcus Vance sat at the dining table, surrounded by three laptops, a portable high-speed scanner, and stacks of wire manifests. Rachel was on her phone, speaking in low, urgent tones with an international maritime banking attorney in London.
Rachel hung up, pinched the bridge of her nose, and walked over to me.
"We just confirmed the Zurich account details," Rachel said, her voice tight with tension. "Victoria Ashworth’s firm isn't acting alone. The eight hundred thousand dollars Derek wired to St. Jude Capital was transferred at four o'clock this afternoon into a private numbered trust in Vaduz, Liechtenstein."
"Can we freeze it?" I asked, turning around.
"Not through a standard domestic motion," Marcus answered, looking up from his screen with a grim expression. "Liechtenstein doesn't recognize U.S. federal magistrate freeze orders without an emergency exequatur proceeding filed in their royal court. And we only have five days. By five o'clock on December thirty-first, St. Jude’s automated foreclosure mechanism will execute. If the $2.2 million balance isn't deposited into the escrow account, title to the Georgetown property transfers automatically to Ashworth Heritage Properties, and your corporate accounts at Mercer Crest will be hit with an immediate multi-million-dollar deficiency lien."
I walked back to the table and looked at the glowing screen.
The countdown was ticking. Five days, twenty-one hours, and fourteen minutes until the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.
"How much liquid cash does Mercer Crest have in its primary operating reserves right now, Marcus?" I asked.
"One point eight million," Marcus said immediately. "If you drain every single penny of your corporate reserves, you’re still four hundred thousand short of satisfying the fraudulent lien."
"Then we don't satisfy the lien," I said, a dangerous, razor-sharp calm settling over me.
Rachel raised an eyebrow. "What are you thinking, Vanessa?"
"Victoria Ashworth thinks she’s holding all the cards because the debt is registered offshore," I said, tapping the screen where the Cayman entity's registration was displayed. "She thinks because Arthur Prescott and her father were fraternity brothers forty years ago, the system will always protect them. But Victoria made a mistake. A fatal mistake."
"Which is?" Marcus leaned in.
"She used Ashworth & Sterling's client trust account as the intermediary routing node for the wire transfer," I said, pointing to the transaction routing number. "Under the Patriot Act and federal anti-money laundering statutes, any domestic law firm account used to facilitate the transfer of funds derived from bank fraud is subject to immediate civil asset forfeiture by the Department of the Treasury."
Rachel’s eyes widened as the sheer brilliance of the trap hit her.
"My God," Rachel whispered, a slow, predatory smile spreading across her lips. "If the Treasury Department freezes Ashworth & Sterling's master trust account, every single real estate transaction, every corporate merger, and every private client escrow handled by the most prestigious law firm on K Street will grind to an immediate, catastrophic halt."
"Exactly," I said. "Victoria didn't just risk her own career to steal my house. She put her entire firm's ninety-year existence on the chopping block to help Derek Prescott."
Just then, Marcus’s private phone buzzed sharply on the table.
Marcus looked at the caller ID, his eyebrows shooting up in surprise.
"It’s Julian Ashworth," Marcus said, looking at me. "Victoria’s father. Senior Managing Partner of Ashworth & Sterling."
The room went completely still. The silence was broken only by the faint, rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.
May you like
I looked at Rachel. Rachel gave me a slow, decisive nod.
"Put it on speaker, Marcus," I said, leaning over the table, my voice cold, lethal, and unwavering. "Let’s hear how much the Prescott name is worth to K Street on Christmas night."
