Chapter 3 - The Cornered Vipers
The "safe location" Professor Hughes sent me to was a modest, secluded cabin in the hills of Palomar Mountain, about two hours north of San Diego. It belonged to her sister, a retired judge who valued privacy above all else.
For three days, I stayed inside, watching the world burn from behind a laptop screen.
The fall of the Bennett family was spectacular.
The district attorney, pressured by the massive public outcry on social media, had moved with unprecedented speed. By Friday morning, federal agents had raided the offices of Bennett Global Group. Images of FBI agents carrying boxes of documents out of my father’s glass skyscraper were splashed across every news channel.
My father’s face, pale and exhausted, was captured in a mugshot that quickly became a meme across the internet. He had been denied bail due to being a flight risk.
My mother and Ethan had holed up in our family mansion in La Jolla, surrounded by a wall of high-priced defense attorneys. But their defense was crumbling.
On the fourth night, my phone rang. It was an unknown number.
I hesitated, then answered.
"Emily?"
It was my mother’s voice. But the cold, haughty tone was gone. She sounded older, fragile, and desperate.
"What do you want, Eleanor?" I asked, refusing to call her mother.
"Emily, you have to help us," she sobbed, her voice cracking with theatrical grief. "The bank has frozen all of our personal accounts. They’re seizing the house. Ethan... they’re talking about indicting Ethan as an accomplice because his name was on the corporate charter. He’s just a boy, Emily! He didn't know what his father was doing!"
"He knew enough to take fifty thousand dollars of my college tuition to pay off his dean," I said coldly. "He knew enough to laugh about me working double shifts while he spent my inheritance on luxury cars."
"We are your family!" she screamed, the desperation turning into familiar venom. "You are destroying us! If we go down, you get nothing! The trust fund... the bank won't release it if the Bennett name is associated with criminal activity! You’ll be just as broke as we are!"
"I’ve been broke my entire life, Eleanor," I replied, my voice calm and even. "I know how to survive on dry toast and tap water. Can you say the same?"
"You ungrateful little bitch—"
I hung up.
I walked to the window, looking out over the dark, pine-covered slopes of the mountain. The air was crisp and clean, miles away from the toxic, suffocating atmosphere of the La Jolla mansion.
But I knew the battle wasn't over. My father’s lawyers were already filing motions to discredit the evidence on the flash drive, claiming it was obtained through illegal hacking and therefore inadmissible in court.
They were trying to use the legal system's loopholes to slip through my fingers.
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They didn't know that I had one more card to play.
A card that my grandmother, Clara Bennett, had left for me in a safety deposit box at the San Diego National Bank—one that could only be accessed after my graduation.
