Chapter 4: Rats on a Sinking Ship
Chapter 4: Rats on a Sinking Ship
By the end of the week, the 'family' had completely imploded.
Without the mansion, the cars, or the bank accounts, Andrew was toxic. The moment Brenda realized the billionaire lifestyle was gone, she vanished. Andrew woke up in a cheap motel to find she had stolen his last luxury watch and pawned it for a flight to Miami, leaving him with nothing but a note that read: I don't do broke.
Margaret didn't fare much better. The high-society friends she had spent decades brown-nosing wouldn't even return her phone calls. The women who used to drink champagne in her garden now gossiped viciously about her eviction. Forced to move into a tiny, damp apartment on the outskirts of the city, Margaret spent her days aggressively refreshing her banking app, hoping for a miracle that would never come.
But the final nail in the coffin came on a rainy Tuesday morning.
May you like
I sat in my corner office, reviewing the final audits of Vanguard Tech. Now that I wasn't artificially inflating Andrew's ledgers, the SEC had taken an interest in his past financial filings.
When the FBI raided his motel room, it made the evening news. I watched on my tablet as Andrew—wearing a rumpled t-shirt and handcuffs—was shoved into the back of a federal cruiser. He looked into the news cameras, his eyes hollow and haunted. He finally understood that the woman he thought was a peasant was the only thing keeping him out of a cage.
