Chapter 5 - Z
The Sterling family estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, had always looked like a palace built for royalty. Surrounded by wrought-iron gates, sprawling velvet lawns, and ancient oak trees, the thirty-room stone mansion was designed to project timeless elegance and untouchable wealth. But as my car pulled up the long, winding driveway, the estate looked more like a gilded prison.
Two news vans were parked outside the main gate, their camera crews waiting like vultures for a glimpse of the fallen socialites. I bypassed them using the estate’s secondary service entrance, parking my sedan near the garages.
I unlocked the side entrance with my old key—the one key they had forgotten to demand back when they threw me out—and stepped into the echoing marble foyer. The house was unnaturally quiet. The team of domestic staff that usually bustled through the hallways had been dismissed; my father could no longer afford their payroll with the company accounts frozen.
I found my mother sitting alone in the sunroom, staring out at the manicured gardens. She was holding a cold cup of tea, dressed in a silk robe, looking astonishingly frail without her armor of hairspray, tailored suits, and diamond jewelry.
"You didn't knock," she said softly, her voice devoid of its usual sharp bite. She didn't even turn around to face me.
"I used to live here, Victoria," I said, deliberately using her first name.
She flinched slightly at the sound of her name, finally turning her head to look at me. Her eyes were hollow, framed by dark circles that no expensive cream could hide. "Are you here to gloat, Eleanor? To watch us pack up our lives into cardboard boxes?"
"I'm here to ask you about Cook County, Illinois," I said coldly, walking over and tossing the copy of her real birth certificate onto the glass table in front of her. "Or should I call you Victoria Marie Moretti?"
The tea cup slipped from her fingers, shattering against the stone floor, spilling lukewarm brown liquid across her silk slippers. Her face turned a horrific, ghostly shade of white. All the aristocratic arrogance she had worn like a second skin for thirty years vanished in a single, shattered second.
"Where... where did you get that?" she whispered, her voice trembling so violently she could barely articulate the words.
"Julianna Vance-Moretti gave it to me," I replied, standing over her like a judge delivering a verdict. "She walked into my office three hours ago. She told me everything, Victoria. She told me you were planted in my father's life to dismantle Vance Crest from the inside. She told me you gave Arthur the master encryption key to Grandfather's trust."
Victoria covered her face with her trembling hands and began to sob—not the theatrical, manipulative tears she had cried in the boardroom earlier that morning, but real, gut-wrenching wails of terror and despair.
"It wasn't like that!" she wept, shaking her head hysterically. "You don't understand, Eleanor! You don't know what the Moretti family is capable of!"
"Then explain it to me!" I shouted, my restraint finally snapping. The rage I had buried for six months—the betrayal, the public humiliation, the theft of my life's work—erupted like a volcano. "Explain to me how a mother looks her own daughter in the eye and allows her to be stripped of her inheritance, humiliated, and thrown out into the street for a criminal family that treated her like an operative!"
Victoria looked up at me, her face smeared with tears and running makeup. "Because they were going to kill you, Eleanor!" she screamed back.
The sunroom fell dead silent. The wind rustled the leaves outside the glass windows, but inside, time seemed to freeze.
"What?" I asked, my voice dropping to an icy whisper.
"Your grandfather discovered who I was six months before he died," Victoria confessed, her body shaking as she pulled her knees up to her chest like a frightened child. "Edward found out my real maiden name. He confronted me. He was going to turn me over to the authorities and disinherit your father completely. But Charles Moretti—Julianna’s father—found out."
She took a shaky, shuddering breath before continuing. "Charles told me that if Edward went to the police, my entire branch of the family would be eliminated. He promised that if I helped them secure Vance Crest's asset architecture, they would leave my children untouched. But then Edward died of a sudden heart attack... and I knew Charles had poisoned him."
A chilling shiver ran down my spine. My grandfather's death had always been ruled as natural causes due to his advanced age. The thought that he had been murdered to protect the takeover was terrifying.
"When you turned twenty-eight," Victoria continued, looking at me with eyes full of haunting regret, "you started auditing the trust accounts. You were too smart, Eleanor. You were uncovering the path of the stolen funds. Charles told me you were becoming a liability. He told me... he told me to handle you, or he would."
"The car accident," I gasped, the memory of that terrifying night flashing through my mind. Two years ago, a black SUV had rammed my sedan off the rain-slicked highway, leaving me hospitalized for three weeks with fractured ribs and a severe concussion. The police had ruled it a hit-and-run by an unidentified driver.
"I didn't order the crash!" Victoria cried out desperately, reaching for my hand, though I yanked it away from her touch. "I swear to God, Eleanor, I didn't! That was Charles! After you survived, I realized the only way to keep you alive was to make you completely useless to the company. I convinced your father to push you out. I convinced him to give your shares to Sienna and bring Arthur in. I had to make Charles believe you were broken, bitter, and out of the picture, so he wouldn't finish the job!"
I backed away from her, my mind spinning into complete chaos. The woman who had treated me with cold cruelty for years, who had banished me from my own family, claimed she had done it to save my life.
"You sacrificed my life to save it," I said, a bitter, hysterical laugh escaping my throat. "You destroyed me, Victoria. You let Sienna marry a bigamist! You let Dad commit federal wire fraud!"
"I was trapped!" she sobbed, burying her face in her lap. "Arthur was sent to oversee the final phase. He realized he could use the situation to enrich himself. He threatened to tell your father about my identity if I didn't give him the trust key. So I gave it to him. I thought... I thought if he took the money and left, the nightmare would finally be over!"
"It's not over," I said, staring down at my mother with a mixture of disgust and profound pity. "Julianna has given me until nine o'clock tomorrow morning to sign Vance Crest over to Moretti Group. If I don't, she turns the fraud evidence over to the federal prosecutors, and you go to prison for the rest of your life."
Victoria looked up, her eyes wide with terror. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to finish what Grandfather started," I said firmly, pulling my phone from my pocket as it began to ring. It was Brooke. She had just landed at JFK Airport.
"Eleanor," Brooke said over the speaker. "I have the key. I’m heading to 40 Wall Street now."
"I'm meeting you there," I said.
May you like
I looked down at Victoria one last time. "Stay in this house. Don't call Julianna, don't call Dad, and don't touch anything. If you want to survive the next twenty-four hours, Victoria, you will sit in this room and pray that I find what Arthur hid in that vault."
Without waiting for her response, I turned and strode out of the mansion into the gathering darkness of the evening.
