Chapter 4 - Total Meltdown
"Turn it off! Turn it off right now! This is a sick joke!" Ethan screamed, lunging frantically toward the home automation panel on the wall. But I had already locked the entire system's master controls from my encrypted phone.
Lily looked as though she might collapse onto the marble floor, clutching her baby so tightly the poor child began to wail. The guests shrank away from her as if she carried a highly contagious plague. The shocked whispers of the crowd quickly turned into a deafening roar of disgust and condemnation.
"Claire, this is a fabrication! It’s a cheap AI voice clone! You're insane!" Ethan shouted, turning to face the crowd, his hands shaking violently as sweat poured down his temples. "Don't listen to her! She's mentally unstable! She's been grieving her father and she's lost her mind!"
"Is this an AI clone too, Ethan?" I asked, gesturing calmly toward the grand double doors of the ballroom.
The heavy doors swung open, and Naomi Price walked in, followed closely by two uniformed police officers and a senior investigator from the District Attorney’s white-collar crime unit.
"Ethan Vance," the investigator announced, his voice booming over the stunned crowd. "You are under arrest for grand larceny, identity theft, and corporate forgery. You attempted to illegally wire forty-two million dollars out of the Vance Family Trust this morning using forged power-of-attorney documents."
"What?!" Ethan gasped, his eyes darting frantically between me, Naomi, and the approaching officers. "No, no! That money was legally transferred! The documents were signed by her! I have the physical copies!"
"They were signed with a highly specific, bank-monitored security duress signature, you pathetic thief," I said, stepping down from the podium. My voice cut through the room like dry ice. "Every single dime you tried to steal is perfectly safe in a secure holding vault. In fact, because you used our joint household funds to pay the black-market hacker who forged those documents, the bank has already seized your personal accounts as active evidence. You are completely, utterly broke."
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Lily burst into hysterical, ugly tears, dropping to her knees. "Ethan, do something! You said we were safe! You said she was an idiot who would never suspect a thing!"
"She's not the idiot, Lily," I whispered, walking right up to my sobbing sister. "But you are. You traded your sister's lifetime of love, protection, and generosity for a man who is about to spend the next twenty-five years of his life in a federal penitentiary."
