Chapter 14 - The Price of Silence
By midnight, the conference room of Vance & Sterling on the fiftieth floor of the Prudential Plaza was ablaze with light.
Harold Vance sat at the head of the glass table, smoking an imported cigar while reviewing the foreclosure notices.
Beside him sat Victoria Sterling, the icy, sharp-featured heiress whose family had once sought an alliance with the Kane empire before Adrian’s public downfall.
The door to the boardroom swung open without warning.
Adrian Kane walked in, unannounced, uninvited, and drenched in rain.
The two security guards who hurried after him halted as Adrian slammed a certified bank draft onto the glass table directly in front of Harold Vance.
The paper slid across the smooth surface, stopping against Harold’s crystal tumbler of scotch.
"What is this theatrical nonsense, Adrian?" Harold sneered, tapping the ash from his cigar.
"You look like a drowned vagrant.
Have you forgotten how gentlemen conduct business in this city?"
"Thirty-five million dollars," Adrian said, leaning over the table, his knuckles whitening against the glass.
"Drawn from my personal liquid reserve account in Zurich.
It purchases every debt note, every mortgage lien, and every industrial bond Vance & Sterling holds over the Calumet basin corridor."
Victoria Sterling let out a brittle, humorless laugh.
"Thirty-five million?
Adrian, darling, you’re bankrupting yourself.
That is your entire personal inheritance from your mother’s estate.
If you liquidate that, you won't even have enough to keep the heat running in your Lake Forest mausoleum."
"Take it or leave it," Adrian snapped, his gaze drilling into Harold Vance.
"If you sign over the release of the liens tonight, I surrender my voting proxy on the Port Authority development board to you, Harold.
You get the commercial shipping lanes you've coveted for a decade."
Harold’s eyes narrowed, greed battling with malice behind his gold-rimmed spectacles.
"And what do you want in exchange, Adrian?
Immunity for your father’s old crimes?"
"No," Adrian said softly, his voice cutting through the hum of the air conditioner like a scalpel.
"I want the environmental injunction against the Margaret Bennett Health Center shredded.
I want twenty-four months of unconditional operational independence granted to Claire Bennett’s medical trust.
And you will sign a non-disclosure agreement stating that Kane Enterprises bears sole liability for any historical subterranean waste on that site."
Victoria rose from her chair, her silk dress rustling sharply.
"You are insane.
She left you!
She humiliated you in front of the entire Chicago elite!
She stripped you of your pride, your social standing, and your dignity, and you are throwing your last dollar into the gutter to protect her clinic?"
Adrian turned his head slowly to look at Victoria.
"Claire didn't humiliate me, Victoria.
I humiliated myself by failing to recognize who she was when I had the privilege of calling her my wife.
Sign the papers, Harold.
Or tomorrow morning, the Chicago Tribune receives a full copy of the Vance family’s offshore shell accounts."
May you like
Harold Vance’s face turned the color of curdled milk.
He picked up his fountain pen with trembling fingers.
