Chapter 7 - TRUST ME OR DIE
Emily dropped the phone onto the rusted metal desk as if the glass had turned to white-hot iron. She took three sharp steps back from Matthew, her eyes wide with a sudden, paralyzing wave of distrust that felt heavier than the threat of the mercenaries outside.
"You worked for her," she whispered, her voice cracking as the rain slammed against the aluminum roof. "The text... it says you were her primary financial strategist in 2021. That was the exact year my father died. The penthouse, your firm, your entire rise to power—it was funded by her."
Matthew closed the laptop slowly. The cold, untouchable billionaire facade he wore like armor didn't slip, but his jaw clenched so tightly the muscles pulsed beneath his skin. He stood up, his hands open, deliberately showing he was unarmed as he took a cautious step toward her.
"Emily, listen to me carefully," Matthew said, his voice dropping into a tight, urgent register. "You are looking at a fragment of a much larger board."
"No!" she shouted, her back hitting a concrete support pillar. "You told me you were my father's friend! You told me you made a sacred vow! But you were sitting in her office, signing her corporate ledgers while she was forging my father's will! You helped her move the very money she stole!"
"I was building the gallows for her!" Matthew roared, his usual icy composure fracturing completely, revealing a raw, bleeding frustration underneath. He didn't step closer, respecting the terror in her eyes, but his gaze pinned her to the pillar.
"When Arthur’s car went over that guardrail, I knew within an hour it wasn't an accident. But I had zero legal leverage. The local precinct was bought, the estate lawyers were intimidated, and Vanessa had already locked down the house. If I had come forward as a hostile outsider, she would have used the shadow board to destroy my firm and erase any trace of your father's true files. The only way to get close enough to the financial records to prove the murder was to let her believe she had bought me."
He took a deep, ragged breath, his eyes reflecting the dark blue light of the laptop. "Every asset I acquired in 2021—the penthouse, the offshore accounts, the security contracts—was funded by a blind trust your father established for me ten years ago for this exact scenario. I didn't take a single dime of Vanessa’s blood money. I played the part of the greedy, ruthless consultant so she would hand me her keys. I had to let her trust me, Emily, so that when the time came, I could hand the rope to the feds myself."
Emily stared at him, her chest heaving as she searched his face. For three years, she had been surrounded by master actors, but the desperation in Matthew's voice wasn't rehearsed. It was the exhaustion of a man who had been living in the mouth of the beast, waiting for the trap to snap shut.
Before she could speak, the sharp static of Matthew’s secondary tactical radio shattered the silence. Marcus’s panicked voice cut through the speaker from the silver sedan parked downstairs.
"Sir! We have a catastrophic breach at the downtown core. It’s not the mercenaries—it’s Vanessa. She just went live on every national news network from the Harper Corporation headquarters... and she has Clara."
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Emily’s heart stopped. Clara. Her seven-year-old foster sister, the only innocent soul left in that mausoleum of a house.
"Vanessa is announcing that you've suffered a complete psychological collapse due to grief, Miss Emily," Marcus reported frantically over the static. "She’s telling the press you kidnapped Clara at gunpoint and fled the state. There’s a five-million-dollar bounty on your recovery. The local authorities have been authorized to use lethal force."
