Chapter 248

Chapter 248
Stella's POV

The news spread through Seattle's legal circles like wildfire. Victor Mellon, CEO of Mellon Aerospace & Defense, was looking at a maximum sentence of ten years. Ten years. The lawyers had done their job too well, burying the worst charges under layers of technicalities and statute-of-limitations arguments. Commercial bribery. Embezzlement. Fraud. All bloodless corporate crimes that carried sentences measured in single digits, not decades.

I stood in my apartment, staring at the legal brief Ghost had sent me, feeling the familiar cold rage settle into my bones. Five years. Five years since I'd learned the truth about who I was, since I'd started planning this moment. Five years of careful maneuvering, of building a case that should have been airtight. And all I had to show for it was a decade behind bars for a man who deserved to rot in hell for the rest of his life.

The charges were too clean, too white-collar. They didn't capture the blood on his hands, the lives he'd destroyed. They didn't account for my grandmother's body broken on the pavement twenty-three years ago, or my mother's ashes scattered to the wind. Commercial crimes. As if that's all he'd done. As if murder was just another line item on a balance sheet.

I needed the murder charge. That was the only thing that would stick, the only crime that carried the weight of what he'd actually done. But Ghost's latest update made my stomach turn. River, the witness who'd seen my grandmother go to the roof with a man that day, had been spotted three months ago in Vancouver. Just once, captured on a museum's security camera. Since then, nothing. A week of digging into his school records, his family, his known associates had turned up exactly zero leads. The man had vanished like smoke.

The case from twenty-three years ago had never been properly investigated. The evidence was sloppy at best, fabricated at worst. And time was running out. Victor's arraignment was in two weeks. If I couldn't find something concrete before then, he'd walk away with a slap on the wrist and a comfortable retirement funded by offshore accounts I'd never be able to touch.

I set the brief down and picked up my phone, pulling up the other file Ghost had sent. Daniel Miller. According to those same sources, Victor had once stabbed him eleven times in what was ruled a "business dispute."

Eleven stab wounds. That wasn't a dispute. That was attempted murder, pure and simple. If Daniel pressed charges, if he was willing to testify, Victor wouldn't be looking at ten years for fraud. He'd be looking at life without parole, maybe even death row depending on how aggressive the prosecutor wanted to be.

But Daniel had never filed a police report. Never sought charges. Because Daniel Miller was dirty too, and he knew that opening that door would mean exposing his own crimes to scrutiny. So he'd taken the beating, licked his wounds, and moved on. Smart. Self-preserving. And utterly useless to me unless I could find a way to force his hand.

That's why I'd gone to Hale Gallery two weeks ago. Why I'd stood in front of Chloe and let her see me, let her feel threatened by my presence in her carefully constructed world. I'd needed to provoke a reaction, to make her feel cornered enough to reach out to the one person she thought could still protect her: her mother.

And it had worked. According to the listening device I'd planted in Vivian's bedroom, Chloe had gone running home within hours of our encounter, sobbing about how I was ruining everything, how I was trying to steal her life. Three days of crying jags. Five days of emotional manipulation. Yesterday, Chloe had locked herself in the bathroom and threatened suicide unless Vivian did something about me.

Vivian, for all her faults, loved her daughter with a fierce, protective intensity that bordered on pathological. She'd do anything to keep Chloe safe, to preserve the illusion of the life they'd built together. And when faced with her daughter's hysteria, when confronted with the possibility that I might actually destroy everything they'd stolen from me, Vivian had made a choice.

She was coming for me. Not with lawyers or private investigators or carefully orchestrated social sabotage. No, Vivian Mellon was too desperate for subtlety now. She was coming with the only weapon she had left: public humiliation.

My phone buzzed. A text from one of the junior analysts at Veridian Sterling Group, someone I'd befriended during my first week on the job. "Holy shit, Stella. There's some woman outside the building screaming about you. Security can't get her to leave. Mr. Wade just went downstairs."

I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow breath. Right on schedule.

Vivian had arrived at Veridian Sterling Group's headquarters twenty minutes ago, according to the building's security cameras that Ghost had tapped into. She'd walked through the revolving doors wearing a stained housedress and carrying a homemade banner that read "VERIDIAN STERLING PROTECTS HOME-WRECKERS" in dripping red paint. She'd knelt in the lobby, blocking foot traffic, and started shouting about how I'd stolen her daughter's fiancé, how I'd wormed my way into a job through sexual favors, how the company was complicit in harboring a morally bankrupt woman.

Security had tried to move her. She'd gone limp, forcing them to either drag her bodily across the marble floor or call the police. When they'd threatened to call the cops, she'd stood up, walked outside, and promptly knelt again on the sidewalk directly in front of the main entrance. Now she was blocking the path of every executive, investor, and high-net-worth client who walked through those doors, her voice amplified by a battery-powered megaphone that looped the same accusations over and over.

"Veridian Sterling Group employs mistresses! Stella Taylor sold her body for a promotion! She's a home-wrecker! A liar! A whore!"