Chapter 4 - The Corporate Collapse
By noon, the house was silent once again. The lock-changing team I had hired three days prior had already replaced every digital pad and deadbolt on the estate. The physical doors were secure, but my real work was only beginning.
I sat in the home office—the office Ryan had used to plot my financial ruin—and opened my laptop. On the high-definition monitor was a real-time dashboard of Vance Design Group, the boutique architectural firm Ryan had founded eight years ago with my capital.
Ryan believed that losing the house was the absolute worst thing that could happen to him today. He had no idea that the house was merely the collateral. The real prize had always been the company.
My phone rang. The caller ID displayed the name of Julian Thorne, the principal partner at Thorne & Vance, the international development firm that supplied seventy percent of Ryan’s corporate revenue.
“Claire,” Julian’s deep, measured voice came through the speaker. “I just received a rather chaotic phone call from Ryan. He was screaming about frozen bank accounts and stolen properties. What on earth is happening over there?”
“Hello, Julian,” I said calmly, sipping fresh chamomile tea from a clean mug. “Ryan’s personal debts were leveraged using his equity shares in Vance Design Group. When he defaulted on his secondary financial obligations this morning, those equity shares were transferred to my holding firm, Sterling LLC.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I could hear Julian shuffling papers on his mahogany desk in his penthouse downtown.
“Are you telling me you now hold controlling interest in his agency?” Julian asked, a hint of genuine amusement entering his tone.
“I hold sixty-four percent of the voting shares, Julian,” I replied. “Which brings me to our scheduled conversation regarding the Riviera Resort project.”
The Riviera Resort project was a fifty-million-dollar waterfront commercial contract. It was the contract Ryan had been betting his entire career on—the deal he claimed would make him a billionaire and allow him to discard me for younger, prettier women like Maya.
“Ryan claimed the design blueprints were ninety percent complete and ready for city submission on Monday,” Julian said, his voice instantly turning business-focused. “Is that true?”
“No,” I said bluntly. “Ryan hasn’t touched a drafting board in six months. Maya—his junior director—has been handling the schematics, and she has copied forty percent of the structural framework directly from a copyrighted design owned by a firm in Milan. If you submit those blueprints on Monday, the developer will face a fifty-million-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit.”
I heard Julian pull his phone away from his ear and let out a long, low whistle. “Good God. He was going to sink our entire joint venture.”
“He was desperate,” I explained. “He thought if he paid off his short-term debt with my money, he could rush the project through, take the advance commission, and leave me with the wreckage during our divorce.”
“What do you propose, Claire?” Julian asked, his tone shifting from casual acquaintance to sharp investor. “You aren’t an architect.”
“No, but I am a structural engineer with a master’s degree from MIT—the degree Ryan convinced me to set aside so I could handle his company’s backend administration,” I said coldly. “I have spent the last three weeks completely redesigning the Riviera schematics from scratch. They are fully original, twenty percent more cost-effective, and already approved by the structural safety board.”
“You redesigned the entire Riviera master plan by yourself?”
“I did,” I said, clicking a key on my laptop to transmit a heavily encrypted file directly to his secure server. “I am sending you the prospective blueprints now. Along with a proposal: fire Ryan Vance from the Riviera project entirely, dissolve his management rights, and appoint Sterling Holdings as the primary design consultant.”
For thirty seconds, the phone was completely silent as Julian reviewed the high-resolution renderings appearing on his monitor. When he spoke again, his voice was filled with deep respect.
“These schematics are brilliant, Claire. They make Ryan’s previous work look like amateur sketches.”
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“Because they were amateur sketches, Julian,” I said softly. “Ryan never had the talent. He only had my brain, my money, and his own arrogance.”
“Consider it done,” Julian said smoothly. “I will have our legal team draft the termination notice for Ryan Vance by three o’clock today. He won’t even be allowed in the building.”
