Chapter 5 - Unmasking the Sterling Alliance
A collective gasp swept through the ballroom like a wave.
Reporters from the Boston Globe began recording frantically with their cameras, their flashes illuminating the terror on Seraphina’s face.
"She’s lying!" Seraphina shrieked, backing away toward her father, Senator Sterling, who was sitting in the front row looking pale and paralyzed. "She’s an unstable orphan! My family owned those harbor rights for decades!"
"Your family owned nothing, Seraphina," Julian Vance declared, pulling up a digital projection on the ballroom’s massive presentation screen behind the stage.
The screen lit up with live legal documents, displaying side-by-side comparisons of my mother's original trust deed and the fraudulent transfers executed by Thaddeus and Seraphina three weeks prior.
The primary signature on the transfer was dated yesterday morning—the exact same day Thaddeus had married Seraphina at City Hall before returning to the presidential suite to tell me to "wait thirty more days."
The corporate board members in the audience stood up from their tables, their expressions shifting from polite entertainment to cold, righteous fury.
"Thaddeus!" the lead board director roared from the second row. "Is this true? Did you execute an unauthorized property transfer using forged signatures?"
Thaddeus couldn't speak. He looked up at me on the stage, his mouth opening and closing, every lie he had constructed over seven years shattering into a thousand jagged pieces.
I stepped down from the podium, walking slowly down the stage stairs until I stood mere inches from the man who had promised I would be his wife.
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"You told me thirty days, Thaddeus," I whispered, holding his gaze with a cold, beautiful calm.
"I didn't even need twenty-four hours."
