Chapter 16 - The Voice of the Betrayed
We managed to get Dr. Henderson to an underground safe house operated by Caleb’s trusted colleagues from his military service days.
The flash drive containing the genuine medical records was secure, but our enemies had escalated the war into bloodshed.
The attack proved that Edward Vance was desperate to keep Julian out of prison at all costs.
Yet the question remained: why would a father who had disowned his son risk everything to pull him out of a penitentiary?
The answer arrived at dawn from an unexpected and horrifying source.
My encrypted personal phone chimed with a video call request originating from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
It was Selena Gomez.
I stared at the screen, my heart pounding with furious contempt, before accepting the call.
Selena appeared behind the reinforced glass of the prison conference room, wearing an inmate uniform, her face bruised and pale.
She had clearly been assaulted by other inmates, her former glamorous lifestyle stripped away into raw survival.
She spoke with a desperate, ragged voice, begging me not to hang up before hearing what she had to say.
Selena revealed that Edward Vance had never intended to save Julian; he was using Julian as a human sacrifice.
She confessed that five years ago, Julian had discovered that Edward was running an illicit international weapons syndicate through his shipping lines.
Julian had blackmailed his own father to secure his starting capital for the Vance Corporation that I had helped build.
Edward had allowed Julian to fall into prison to let the public eye turn toward me and my new company.
Now, Edward needed Julian out of prison because Julian held the biometric encryption keys to Edward’s offshore accounts in Zurich.
Once Edward extracted those codes from his son, Julian was slated to suffer a fatal, untraceable heart attack inside the estate clinic.
And once Julian was dead, Edward’s trust clause would immediately activate, granting him legal custody of Leo and Maya as the sole surviving Vance male heirs.
Selena broke down in tears, admitting that Edward had promised to secure her early release in exchange for her silence, but had betrayed her instead.
She offered to provide the decryption keys to Edward’s personal servers if I promised to protect her younger sister from Edward’s hitmen.
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I looked into the eyes of the woman who had laughed as I lay dying in my own living room.
Justice had brought her to her knees, and now she was offering me the dagger to finish the man who had created them all.
