He hadn’t just told you his parents and sister were moving into your house.
He hadn’t just laughed when you called it your house. He had already started using your money, your property, and your silence like they were part of the same unlimited resource. Somewhere in his head, the mansion was no longer a boundary. It was an opening.
You opened the banking portal again and drilled deeper.
The receiving account names came up faster than they should have, which told you he’d made no real effort to hide them because he never thought he had to. One went to a furniture rental company in Round Rock. One went to a private lender whose name sounded expensive and predatory at the same time. The last one went directly to Mariana Vega, his sister, the same woman who had turned every bad decision of the last seven years into a family emergency someone else was expected to finance.
That was when you called your attorney.
Not your regular corporate lawyer. Not the one who handled the sale of your company. You called Claire Lawson, the shark your father had once described with something close to admiration and fear after she had burned a business partner to the ground using only contracts and a smile. She answered on the second ring.
