Chapter 10 - The Inheritance of DebtMonday morning brought a desperate flurry of communications from the suburban house. My phone buzzed incessantly with missed calls and frantic text messages from my mother, my father, and Emily.
I didn't answer a single one. Instead, I forwarded every notification directly to Stratix Defense Systems’ legal department, instructing them to issue a formal cease-and-desist order for harassment and trespassing.
Desperate, my mother and father actually drove out to the security gates of my new estate. From the live monitor on my tablet, I watched them standing outside the reinforced steel gates in the biting wind, waving their hands frantically at the security camera, looking like pathetic beggars pleading for entry.
The head of my security detail, a seasoned sergeant named Miller, called me from the gatehouse intercom. "Mrs. Carter, your relatives are at the perimeter. They claim they have nowhere to go and demand to speak with you. Shall we have local authorities escort them off the property?"
I stood by the floor-to-ceiling bay window of my study, sipping a cup of warm chamomile tea while looking out over the manicured gardens and the distant mountain peaks. I thought about the freezing garage floor. I thought about the bitter cold, the sagging cot, and Emily’s smug smirk as she told me grieving was exhausting.
May you like
"Let them stay at the gate for ten minutes, Sergeant," I replied evenly. "Let them feel the cold concrete of reality for a little while. Then tell them that the locks on their house are being changed by the estate executors at noon."
"Understood, ma'am," Miller replied with a faint note of grim satisfaction in his voice.
Related Stories
