Chapter 4 - The Midnight Audit
The crash came on a Tuesday night, exactly twenty-one days after I signed the transfer papers.
I was sitting on the velvet sofa of my hotel suite, sipping herbal tea and reviewing architectural layouts for my new design firm, when my phone buzzed violently against the mahogany coffee table.
It was an incoming video call from an unknown, encrypted number.
I swiped to accept.
The screen flickered to life, revealing Flynn’s face. But he looked completely unhinged. The tailored suit was gone; he was wearing a rumpled silk bathrobe, his hair sticking up in wild tufts, his eyes bloodshot and wide with sheer, unadulterated panic. In the background, the grand foyer of Cedar Point was bathed in the harsh glare of emergency lights.
“Sloan!” Flynn shrieked, his voice cracking violently. “What the hell did you do? What the absolute hell did you do?!”
I took a slow, deliberate sip of my tea before looking up at the camera, my expression entirely neutral. “Hello, Flynn. Enjoying the house?”
“The accounts!” he screamed, slamming his phone down onto a marble table, the camera shaking wildly before framing his sweating, terrified face. “All of them! My personal checking account, my investment portfolio, my corporate credit lines—they’re all frozen! Every single cent is gone!”
Just then, Cordelia stumbled into the frame behind him. She looked ten years older, her makeup smudged, her face drained of all color.
“Sloan! You listen to me right now!” Cordelia shrieked, lunging toward the phone. “The federal marshals were just here! They served us with an emergency asset seizure notice! They say Cedar Point has an unpayable federal lien attached to it totaling over twelve million dollars in retroactive environmental fines and historic trust violations!”
I raised an eyebrow, letting a cold, thin smile touch my lips.
“Oh, that?” I said smoothly. “That’s just the Grandfather Clause, Cordelia. Didn't you read the fine print on page forty-eight of the transfer agreement? The one Phoebe had you initial twice?”
Flynn grabbed the phone back, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold the device. “There was no fine print! My lawyer reviewed the deed! It was a clean title!”
“Your lawyer reviewed the standard public title summary, Flynn,” I corrected him, my voice dropping into an icy register. “He didn't check the private family trust registry filed under the Federal Historic Preservation Act of 1998. My grandfather structured Cedar Point so that anyone who acquires the estate through voluntary transfer must personally assume 100% of the property's historical remediation liabilities. In short? You don't just own the house now, darling. You own the federally protected wetlands underneath it, the endangered turtle sanctuary that requires a $50,000 monthly maintenance fee, and the multi-million-dollar tax penalty for unauthorized structural modifications.”
Flynn stared at me through the screen, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. “That... that’s impossible. You can't do that! That’s entrapment!”
“It’s not entrapment, Flynn,” I replied calmly. “It's inheritance law. You wanted my grandfather’s house so badly. You were willing to watch me bleed on these very stairs to get it. You were willing to push me down a flight of fourteen hardwood steps and step right over my broken body just to secure a five-million-dollar asset.”
My voice hardened, echoing coldly through the phone speakers.
“Well, congratulations. You secured it. And now, every single cent you and your mother own—every stock, every bond, every luxury car, every offshore account—is legally tied to paying off my grandfather’s environmental trust. You are utterly, irrevocably bankrupt.”
Cordelia let out a high-pitched, hysterical wail and collapsed onto the grand staircase behind Flynn—the exact same spot where she had pushed me down two short weeks ago.
Flynn dropped to his knees, staring into the camera with desperate, weeping eyes. “Sloan... please. We can fix this. We’re husband and wife! Drop the lien! Take the house back! Please!”
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“We’re getting a divorce, remember?” I whispered.
And with a single tap of my thumb, I hung up the call, blocked their numbers forever, and watched the screen go entirely black.
