CHAPTER 6
The legal battle that followed was brief but absolutely devastating, turning into the most high-profile case of the season in the Manhattan courts. Gabriel’s legal team, a collection of the most expensive and ruthless sharks on Wall Street, filed a mountain of evidence against Serena.
They produced wire transfers proving she had been embezzling money from his corporate accounts since the day she moved in. They presented forensic reports regarding the locking mechanism of the closet, proving the imprisonment was not an accident but a calculated, premeditated act of malice.
Serena sat in the courtroom, stripped of her designer wardrobe and forced to wear a drab prison jumpsuit, looking a shadow of the woman who had walked down the aisle. She tried to maintain her haughty facade, but every time Gabriel glanced her way, she visibly withered under his cold, unforgiving gaze.
“The defendant knowingly endangered a child for personal gain,” the prosecutor stated, his voice booming through the chamber. “She treated this wedding not as a union of love, but as a hostile takeover of a family’s security and future.”
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The jury members looked at Gabriel, then at the innocent, wide-eyed Lily sitting in the gallery, and their expressions hardened into concrete. Serena realized then that there was no jury of her peers that would save her; she was utterly, completely alone.
The gavel fell with a sound like a gunshot, signaling the end of her freedom and the beginning of her accountability. She was sentenced to seven years in a federal prison facility, effectively ending her reign of social terror.
