Chapter 22 - The Shadow of Geneva
Liam didn't hesitate. He rose to his feet, stepping squarely between the woman and the bassinet where Noah slept, his body completely shielding the crib.
"Who sent you?" Liam asked, his voice low, measured, and stripped of panic.
"A woman whose life you ruined," she replied, her thumb resting on the red release valve. "Elena Morrison-Vogel."
The name hit the room like a dead weight.
Arthur’s face drained of color. "Elena... Charles Senior’s youngest sister. She died thirty years ago in a private sanitarium in Lucerne."
"She didn't die," the woman sneered, her fingers trembling slightly against the canister. "She was declared incompetent and locked away by Charles Senior because she refused to let him siphon her mother’s ancestral trust into his American maritime front. For thirty years, she lived on a monitored stipend in the Swiss Alps while Diane, Brendan, and now you traded her birthright like poker chips."
"I never touched a single cent belonging to Elena Vogel," I said from the bed, sitting upright despite the sharp postpartum ache in my abdomen. "Every asset I seized was liquidated from Diane's criminal tax frauds and the offshore shell accounts Brendan abandoned. The Swiss courts audited the Morrison trust down to the last franc."
"The Swiss court audited what your expensive attorneys presented," the woman countered. "Elena passed away two weeks ago from pneumonia in an unheated room. Before she closed her eyes, she signed a private debt assignment to our syndicate in Zurich. You owe forty million dollars in unpaid custodial maintenance fees. If the wire isn't confirmed by sunset, this child never takes his first step outside this hospital."
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She tossed a burner flip phone onto the foot of my bed.
"Ten minutes, Mrs. Vance. Or the air vent opens."
