Chapter 2 - The Midnight Freeze
Eva did not waste a single second. Sitting in the quiet hum of the moving Maybach, she tapped three commands into her encrypted enterprise terminal. The first revoked Weston’s security clearances across all commercial properties owned by her development group. The second locked down the escrow pipeline, freezing the eight million dollars in transit.
""Marcus,"" she spoke clearly through the glass partition, ""reroute to the corporate tower. Tell Chief Security Officer Vance to meet me in the main lobby with a full physical lockout team.""
""Right away, Ms. Vance,"" Marcus responded without hesitation.
Eva gently pressed both palms against her swollen belly. A sharp ache tightened across her abdomen, the physical toll of the foyer confrontation manifesting as Braxton Hicks contractions. She exhaled slowly through her nose, regulating her heart rate. She refused to deliver this child in distress because of parasites.
Her phone began to vibrate violently in her clutch. The caller ID flashed Eleanor. Eva answered and put it on speaker without bringing it to her ear.
""Eva! What have you done to the accounts?"" Eleanor’s refined, upper-class veneer had completely disintegrated, replaced by hysterical fury. ""The vendor deposits for the gala tonight are bouncing! The caterers are threatening to walk! Weston is at the emergency clinic with a hairline fracture, and you are playing petty games!""
""Those aren’t games, Eleanor,"" Eva said, her voice devoid of inflection. ""That is reality reasserting itself. You tried to drain my holding escrow from your home terminal forty minutes ago. Did you really think my financial monitors wouldn't detect a wire request routed through a residential server in the Hamptons?""
Silence fell across the line, heavy and guilty.
""You don't understand how business works at this level, child,"" Eleanor hissed, attempting to regain her condescending posture. ""Weston is the public face of the firm. If the gala fails tonight, your company's stock tanks by morning.""
""Correction,"" Eva murmured, watching the glass silhouette of her corporate tower rise against the skyline. ""Weston was an appointed consultant. I am the sole shareholder. And by eight o'clock tonight, his name won't even be permitted on the building directory.""
She ended the call cleanly and stepped out into the skyscraper's subterranean garage. Vance was already waiting beside two armed guards, holding a sealed black folder.
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""Ma'am,"" Vance said, falling into step beside her. ""We executed the system purge. But we found something while clearing Weston’s physical office. He wasn’t just skimming capital.""
Vance handed her the folder. Inside lay an unfiled paternity petition, drafted to strip Eva of legal custody the moment she gave birth.
