Chapter 7 - The Awakening
For a terrifying second, no one breathed in the room. Marcus stared at the barrel of the gun, realizing with sudden, chilling clarity that the homeless girl Sterling had dragged off the streets had outsmarted them all.
“You’re insane,” Whitfield stammered, backing toward the door. “You’ll never leave this estate alive. Security will—!”
“Security takes four minutes to respond to a panic button in this wing,” Willa interrupted coldly, her eyes locked on Marcus. “And I’ve been timing their rotations for four days. Mr. Vance, pull out your phone. Put it on speaker. Call Sterling.”
Marcus’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth clicked. “You think a gun saves you, Willa? Sterling will have every armed man on this property surrounding this room in sixty seconds—”
“Call him,” Willa repeated, her finger tightening slightly on the trigger. “Or I put a bullet through your shoulder and let you bleed out on these imported Persian rugs while I read federal embezzlement statutes to my husband.”
Marcus stared at her face, reading the absolute lack of hesitation in her eyes. Slowly, with trembling fingers, he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out his phone, dialed a speed-dial number, and pressed speaker.
The line rang once. Twice.
“Vance,” Sterling’s impatient voice blared through the speaker. “Is it done? Is she packed?”
“Sterling,” Marcus said, his voice strained. “We have a... complication.”
“What kind of complication? Just sign the papers and get her out of the—!”
“I’m holding a gun to my chest, Sterling,” Willa spoke up, leaning closer to the phone. “Well, technically, Mr. Vance is holding the space where the bullet is about to go. But I’m the one pulling the trigger.”
The phone went dead silent on the other end.
“Willa?” Sterling’s voice pitched upward in disbelief and rage. “How did you—?”
“Listen to me very carefully, Sterling,” Willa said, her voice cutting through the speaker like a razor. “You are going to call off your security goons. You are going to cancel Dr. Whitfield’s medical privileges permanently. And you are going to wire fifty thousand dollars directly to the St. Ambrose memory care facility to clear my mother’s account in full—within the hour.”
“You’re out of your mind! I’ll have you arrested! I’ll—!”
“You’ll do exactly what I say,” Willa countered sharply, “because I am currently standing in your cousin’s bedroom with his personal financial ledgers, his contingency will naming an independent executor, and a flash drive containing every offshore wire transfer you’ve made since twenty-fourteen. If I don't walk out of these gates a free woman by noon with my mother’s care secured, those files go straight to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the federal task force currently investigating corporate racketeering in Chicago.”
The line hissed with static. Sterling was calculating, desperately searching for a way out, realizing that his entire empire was dangling by a thread.
“And if I agree?” Sterling’s voice hissed through the speaker, dripping with venom.
“Then you get to keep your freedom,” Willa said. “For now.”
She ended the call with a swift tap of her thumb, cutting off Sterling’s sputtering rage.
She turned her gaze back to Marcus and Whitfield, who stood frozen in place like statues of guilt and failure.
May you like
“Get out,” Willa commanded, gesturing toward the door with the barrel of the gun.
Marcus glared at her with pure, unadulterated hatred, but he turned on his heel and walked out, dragging a pale, shaking Whitfield behind him. The heavy oak door slammed shut, and the iron security bolt slid back into place with a definitive thunk.
