Chapter 4: The House of Cards
Within three months of Clara’s departure, the illusion of Vance supremacy began to unravel from the inside out.
What Elizabeth failed to realize—and what Clara had quietly managed for a decade—was that Clara wasn't just a daughter; she was the invisible administrative anchor holding the sprawling, corrupt conglomerate together. Without Clara vetting the contracts, managing the quiet compliance audits, and balancing the family’s erratic expenditures, Jessica’s debts multiplied exponentially.
Creditors swarmed the estate. The board of directors, sensing the matriarch’s declining grip on reality and the total incompetence of Jessica, began quietly liquidating their shares.
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Elizabeth sat alone in the vast, echoing library, surrounded by silence. Jessica had already packed her designer luggage and fled to Europe the moment the bank accounts were frozen, leaving her mother to face the federal investigators alone.
Elizabeth picked up her phone, hovering over Clara’s number for a long time. But her finger never pressed call. Pride, heavy and poisonous, stayed her hand. She finally understood the true cost of her ultimatum: she had traded her daughter for a failing empire, and now she had neither.
