PART 2: THE ANATOMY OF A FORGERY
PART 2: THE ANATOMY OF A FORGERY
The silence of the house in the dead of night felt heavy, pressing against my chest like a physical weight as I stared down at the forged document. The witness signature belonged to Arthur Vance—the lead investigator from the Fairmount Fire Department. He was the man who had stood in front of the smoking ruins of my childhood home just three days ago, patted my shoulder with a gloved hand, and told me that an ancient breaker panel in the basement was to blame for the blaze that took my father’s life.
It was all an orchestrated lie.
My father, Wade Erickson, hadn't died because of faulty wiring. He had died because he refused to sign. For the past year, Tristan had been sinking money into a ghost entity called Sterling Logistics, a failing venture he claimed would make us billionaires. I had blindly trusted him, pouring my thirteen years of grueling corporate sales commissions into our bank accounts, believing he was building a legacy. In reality, he had leveraged my Crestview home—the house I bought entirely with my own sweat and tears—and when that wasn't enough capital, he had targeted my parents' pristine land in Fairmount.
I quietly extracted the contents of the blue folder, using my phone to scan every single page, ensuring the flash was turned off. My hands, usually rock-steady during high-stakes corporate negotiations, were trembling so violently I could barely keep the camera in focus. The digital paper trail exposed a predatory loan structure. Tristan and Isolde had taken out a hard-money bridge loan against our Crestview house using the forged deed, and the maturity date was exactly forty-eight hours from now. If they didn't present a clean title transfer to the lenders, the bank would foreclose on everything, exposing their multi-million dollar fraud.
They needed my father dead because the land in Fairmount was legally co-signed under my name and his. With him out of the picture, and my mother heavily sedated by grief, they assumed I would break under the emotional pressure, sign the paperwork, and hand over the deeds to save what was left of our family.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway.
I froze, jamming the blue folder back into the drawer and sliding it shut just as the lock clicked. I slipped into the shadows behind the heavy velvet curtains near the window, my heart hammering against my ribs.
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The door opened, and the sharp, yellow beam of a smartphone flashlight cut through the darkness. Tristan walked in, still wearing his dark sweater, his face haggard. He didn't look toward the window; instead, he walked directly to his desk, checking the lock on the drawer. He touched the brass handle, sighed with relief when he found it secure, and muttered a curse under his breath before walking back out, leaving the door slightly ajar.
I waited ten agonizing minutes before stepping out from behind the curtain. The man I had slept next to for five years wasn't just a parasite; he was a monster. I walked back to the guest room, slipping under the covers beside my mother. She twitched in her sleep, murmuring my father’s name into the darkness. I held her tight, staring at the ceiling until the first grey light of dawn broke through the blinds. The time for crying had passed. My father had taught me how to read contracts, how to spot an ambush, and how to fight when cornered. Tristan wanted a signing ceremony by sunrise. I was going to give him a execution.
