Chapter 7 - The Beggar’s Demands
The secondary conference room felt like a glass cage suspended high above the city. When I walked in, accompanied by Samuel and Marcus, Ethan was pacing back and forth across the carpet like a caged animal.
He looked unrecognizable from the pristine golden boy who had stood beside me twenty-four hours earlier. His tuxedo had been replaced by a wrinkled designer shirt missing two buttons. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw covered in rough stubble, and his hands trembled with nervous, erratic energy.
Agnes sat at the end of the table, clutching a vintage designer handbag as if it were a life raft.
"Elena!" Ethan lunged toward me the moment the door clicked shut.
Marcus immediately stepped between us, his massive frame blocking Ethan with the unyielding force of a brick wall. "Step back, Mr. Vance."
Ethan glared at Marcus, his lips curling back in a snarl, before locking his bloodshot eyes on me.
"Call off your attack dogs, Elena!" Ethan shouted, his voice hoarse. "You think you won? You think you can just discard me like trash after everything I gave you? I ran this company for three years while you stayed home wallowing in self-pity over your dead father!"
"You ran this company into a sixty-million-dollar deficit, Ethan," I replied calmly, taking a seat at the far end of the long conference table, deliberately keeping twenty feet of polished mahogany between us. "You stole from my daughter’s inheritance to buy penthouses for a third-rate PR girl who threw you under the bus the second the police walked into the room."
Ethan flinched at the mention of Vanessa, but his arrogance flared right back up.
"We are legally married, Elena!" Ethan slammed his fist onto the glass table, making Agnes jump. "Under state law, everything you own is marital property! Every share of Aurelia Group, every estate, every trust fund! You cannot freeze my accounts without a judge's ruling, and my lawyers will drag you through probate court until that baby of yours is in college!"
"Did Julian Ross give you those lawyers?" I asked softly.
Ethan froze. The color drained from his face, replaced by a flicker of panic he couldn't completely hide.
"I... I don't know what you're talking about," Ethan stammered, looking away.
"Don't lie to me, Ethan. You never had the intelligence to orchestrate a complex corporate embezzlement on your own," I said, leaning forward. "Ross funded your offshore shell companies. He fed you information on how to bypass our internal audit firewalls. In exchange, you promised to hand him fifty-one percent of Aurelia Group’s voting shares the moment you took over as CEO."
Agnes gasped, turning to stare at her son. "Ethan... is that true? You made a deal with Julian Ross?"
"Shut up, Mother!" Ethan snapped savagely, not even looking at her. He turned back to me, his chest heaving. "It doesn't matter who backed me! The fact is, I am entitled to fifty percent of everything! If you want me out of your life, if you want me to sign the divorce papers and waive my parental rights to the brat in your belly, you pay me one hundred million dollars. Right now. In liquid cash."
I stared at him for a long, quiet moment. The sheer audacity of his demand was almost breathtaking.
May you like
"One hundred million dollars?" I repeated, my tone dangerously calm.
"One hundred million," Ethan sneered, believing he had found my pressure point. "Or I fight you for full custody of the child. I’ll paint you as an emotionally unstable, vindictive woman unfit to be a mother. Let's see what the press does with that."
