Chapter 7 - The Matrix of Deceit
Maris Williams did not look like a woman who had spent the night under the shadow of a criminal investigation. She stepped out of the private elevator into the executive suite wearing a tailored cream-colored linen suit, her hair perfectly coiffed, her pearl earrings catching the morning light. But behind her dark sunglasses, her jaw was set in a tight, defensive line.
She didn't wait for Victor’s secretary to clear her. She marched straight into the boardroom, throwing her designer leather handbag onto the mahogany table.
"Victor!" she snapped, her voice rising as she took off her glasses. "This has gone entirely too far. The media is already calling my house. Some wretched little blogger from the business section saw you carry that child out of the plaza last night. Do you have any idea what this is doing to our stock options?"
Victor remained seated, his hands clasped over his desk blotter. Sofia and Mateo did not leave the room; they remained standing like gray sentinels behind his chair.
"The stock options are fine, Mother," Victor said, his tone conversational, almost pleasant. "In fact, our pre-market trading is up two percent. The market likes it when a CEO cleans out the dead weight."
"Dead weight?" Maris gasped, her hand going to her throat. "I am your mother! I built the social foundation that allowed this company to secure the Reforma contracts! You would be nothing without the connections I made for you after your father died!"
"You didn't make connections, Maris," Victor said, using her first name for the first time in his life. "You spent my father’s life insurance on country club memberships, and then you spent three years stealing one point eight million dollars from an eight-year-old child to keep Julian from having his fingers broken by bookmakers in Houston."
Maris froze, the color leaving her face so rapidly it looked as if her expensive skin cream had turned to chalk. "You... you’ve been looking at the secondary accounts."
"Every single one," Sofia Ramos said from the back of the room, her voice sharp. "We’ve traced the digital clone signatures back to your personal IP address at the Juriquilla estate. Your assistant has already signed a full confession at the federal office in exchange for immunity, Mrs. Williams. She gave us the hard drive containing the faked divorce documents and the templates for the letters you claimed Catherine wrote."
Maris stumbled back a step, her heel catching on the edge of the plush silk rug. She looked at Victor, her eyes wild with a sudden, desperate terror. "Victor... listen to me. Julian was in danger. They were going to kill him. He owed people... dangerous people from the border. What was I supposed to do? Catherine was going to die anyway! Look at her family—her mother died of that same disease before she was forty! Why waste millions on a woman who has no future when your own brother’s life was on the line?"
Victor stood up. He did not look angry; he looked like a judge delivering a sentence that had already been written in stone five hundred years ago.
"The woman you call a waste of money is currently in the ICU because she starved herself to keep my daughter alive," Victor said, walking around the long table until he stood just two inches away from her. The scent of her expensive French perfume smelled like rot to him now. "Tomorrow morning, the board of directors will hold an emergency meeting to strip you of your nominal seat on the foundation board. And right now..."
May you like
He pointed to the glass door of the boardroom. Through the tint, two federal agents in dark suits were waiting with a folder of blue papers.
"Right now, you’re going to find out what happens when the people Julian owes money to realize that your accounts have been frozen by the state," Victor whispered. "The law is going to take your freedom, Mother. But your greed is going to take everything else."
