Chapter 6 - The Paper Trail of Greed
The next morning, the battle shifted from the physical to the financial and legal.
My father’s personal attorney, a fierce family-law advocate named Marcus Vance, arrived at the hospital with a stack of legal documents.
"We’ve filed for an emergency temporary protective order," Marcus explained, handing me a copy. "It grants you exclusive possession of the home and orders Grant and Evelyn to stay at least five hundred feet away from you and any medical facility you visit. The military police have also been notified."
"What about the house?" I asked.
"Your mother’s trust is ironclad," Marcus smiled grimly. "I’ve already contacted the trust administrator. We have frozen all access to any joint accounts associated with the estate. Furthermore, we’ve requested a full forensic audit of your marital assets."
Within six hours, the audit yielded shocking results.
Marcus returned to my hospital room, his face filled with disgust. "Claire, we found why the abuse escalated so rapidly over the last three months."
He laid out several financial statements on my overbed table.
"Your mother’s trust has a specific survivorship clause," Marcus explained. "If you pass away before giving birth, the entire principal of the trust—worth approximately 2.4 million dollars—passes to your surviving spouse. However, if you give birth, the trust is immediately locked into a child-educational trust, and Grant cannot touch a single cent."
My breath hitched. "They wanted me... they wanted me to die?"
"Look at this," Marcus pointed to a printout of the home internet router logs that my father’s tech specialist had retrieved. "Three weeks ago, from the computer in Grant's study, someone searched: 'How to induce a hypertensive crisis in pregnant women.' And 'Accidental falls during pregnancy survival rates.'"
"Evelyn," I whispered.
"And there’s more," Marcus continued. "Grant took out a secondary life insurance policy on you two months ago. A million-dollar policy. He forged your signature on the electronic consent form. We also found that over eighty thousand dollars has been systematically transferred from your personal savings account into a private offshore account controlled solely by Evelyn."
They hadn't just wanted to control me. They had been planning to murder me, make it look like a tragic pregnancy complication, and walk away with millions of dollars.
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My father walked over to the window, looking out at the city skyline.
"They played a high-stakes game," Dad said, his voice quiet and dangerous. "But they forgot who they were playing against."
