Chapter 4 - Sienna's Desperate Retaliation
By Friday afternoon, the story had completely broken the local news cycle.
What had started as ballroom gossip among Chicago’s elite had metastasized into a full-blown corporate scandal. *The Chicago Tribune* ran the headline: **TECH CEO OUSTED OVER EMBEZZLEMENT AND LUXURY MISTRESS SCANDAL.** Online, local news blogs had picked up Grace’s audio recording from the Palmer House gala, and it had gone viral on TikTok and Facebook, racking up millions of views under hashtags like #GraceVance and #KarmaAtTheGala.
Derek was in hiding. Repurposed paparazzi photos of him leaving his lawyer's office with his coat over his head were circulating across the internet.
I spent the morning at the Evanston house with Marcus’s team, reviewing the initial asset-tracing reports. It turned out Derek had embezzled far more than the four point two million for the condo. There were jewelry accounts, lease agreements on luxury sports cars, and a secondary checking account through which he had been funneling fifty thousand dollars a month for Sienna’s "lifestyle expenses."
At two-thirty, I drove my Volvo to Grace’s school, the North Shore Academy.
I parked along the tree-lined street outside the red-brick elementary building, waiting for the three o'clock dismissal bell. Parents in luxury SUVs were lined up along the curb, several of them whispering and glancing at my car with sympathetic, knowing looks. I sat tall, my sunglasses on, refusing to shrink.
At two-fifty, the passenger door of my car was suddenly yanked open.
Before I could react, a figure slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.
It was Sienna.
She looked entirely different from the radiant, emerald-clad siren of the Palmer House ballroom. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy ponytail beneath a baseball cap, her designer sunglasses were pushed up on her forehead, and her face was flushed, devoid of makeup, her eyes puffy and ringed with red.
"You have to call off the police," Sienna breathed, her voice trembling with hysteria.
I didn't panic. I didn't reach for the door handle. I calmly slid my hand toward my purse on the floorboard, tapped the side button of my phone to start an emergency audio recording, and looked at her.
"Get out of my car, Sienna," I said, my voice dead and cold.
"Listen to me!" she hissed, leaning toward me, her manicured nails digging into the leather of my center console. "Derek lied to me! He told me you two were already legally separated! He told me the divorce was almost finalized and that the condo was part of his personal buyout compensation! I didn't know he stole the money from your daughter's trust!"
"You didn't know?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "When you accepted a four-million-dollar deed signed by an LLC named after yourself, you didn't think to ask where the funds came from?"
"I trusted him!" she sobbed, though not a single tear fell from her eyes. It was a performance, desperate and theatrical. "The sheriff showed up at the condo this morning! They gave me forty-eight hours to vacate! They froze my personal checking accounts! I have twenty-four dollars in my purse, Eleanor! I have nowhere to go! My landlord in West Loop broke my old lease! My parents won't take my calls because my face is plastered all over the news!"
"That sounds like an issue between you and Derek," I said calmly.
"Derek blocked my number!" she cried, her voice cracking into a shriek. "He left me to take the fall! His lawyer called me and said if I don't sign an affidavit claiming I extorted Derek, he’s going to sue me for fraud! He’s throwing me under the bus!"
"Of course he is," I replied. "Derek only loves Derek. You were an accessory to his vanity, Sienna. You were a trophy he bought to prove to himself that he was young, powerful, and unaccountable. The moment you became a liability, you ceased to exist to him. I knew that eleven years ago. You should have figured it out in eight months."
Sienna’s face contorted. The desperate victim act vanished, replaced by the ugly, snarling desperation of a cornered grifter.
"You think you’ve won?" she whispered, her voice dropping into a vicious rasp. "You think you’re going to sit up here in your pretty Evanston house and raise your little brat while I go to prison? I know things about Derek that aren't in those board documents. I know where the offshore accounts in Nevis are. I have the account numbers on my drive."
I paused. "Go on."
"Give me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," Sienna demanded, leaning closer, her breath smelling of stale coffee and mints. "Cash. In an untraceable cashier's check. You give me the money to get out of the country and start over, and I will hand over the encrypted thumb drive containing every email, every bank transfer, and every foreign routing number Derek used to hide forty million dollars of Vanguard stock sales over the last three years. If you don't... I’ll give the drive to Derek’s defense team, and they'll bury it where you and Marcus Vance will never see a cent of it."
I looked at her for a long, quiet moment.
The dismissal bell of North Shore Academy rang in the distance. Children began pouring out of the double front doors of the school, laughing, swinging their backpacks, their bright jackets dotting the gray pavement.
"Sienna," I said softly.
"What?" she demanded, eyes darting toward the schoolyard.
"You are an amateur."
Sienna blinked. "What did you say?"
"You just entered my private vehicle without consent," I said, pointing up toward the small rearview mirror housing. "The interior dashcam of this Volvo records both video and audio directly to an encrypted cloud server. Furthermore, my phone has been recording our entire conversation."
Sienna's face drained of color.
"Under Illinois law," I continued, speaking with the measured precision Marcus had drilled into me, "what you just did is not a negotiation. It is felony extortion and witness tampering in an ongoing criminal fraud investigation. You have thirty seconds to step out of this vehicle before I press the SOS button on my console and report an active carjacking to the Evanston Police Department, whose precinct station is exactly three blocks away."
Sienna scrambled for the door handle like a rat escaping a sinking barge. She threw the door open, tumbled out onto the curb, and stumbled onto the grass, nearly losing one of her designer sneakers.
She stood on the sidewalk, panting, clutching her coat around herself, looking around frantically as several school mothers stared at her in utter astonishment.
"You're a monster," Sienna choked out.
"No, Sienna," I said, rolling down the passenger window just enough for my voice to reach her. "I'm a mother. And you picked the wrong family to rob."
I rolled up the window, locked the doors, and watched as Grace stepped out of the school gates, her violin case in one hand and her backpack slung over her shoulder.
May you like
Grace spotted my car, broke into a bright, easy smile, and walked toward me, completely oblivious to the ruined woman slinking away down the sidewalk into the cold Chicago drizzle.
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