Chapter 2 - SIX DIGITS
Julian’s office was on the thirty-first floor of Vance Strategic Holdings, dark and silent at 2:47 a.m. when I let myself in with the executive access card still clipped inside his overnight bag.
His desk lamp was the only light I turned on.
I didn’t want brightness.
Brightness made shock look theatrical.
I needed facts.
The safe was hidden behind a framed aerial photograph of the Harbor campus. I had never seen it open. Julian had always treated that wall as decorative space, never functional space. That had been my first mistake—believing his calm meant transparency.
I keyed in the six digits.
The lock clicked.
For a second I stood there without moving.
Then I pulled the heavy door open.
Cash.
A burner phone.
A velvet jewelry box I had never seen before.
A stack of unsigned property documents.
Three memory drives.
An unmarked prescription bottle.
And a red paper folder, thick enough to bow at the spine, placed deliberately at the back as if even inside the safe it needed its own protected place.
My hands hovered over it.
Whatever you find in there, don’t open the red folder.
So of course I opened everything else first.
The cash bundle totaled forty thousand dollars.
The burner phone contained only numbers, not names, and all the call logs were recent.
The jewelry box held a diamond bracelet—not mine.
The property documents were drafts for a transfer option involving Vance Harbor Recovery Center, the rehabilitation campus my brother Adrian had spent months helping expand after his boating accident the previous year.
Why was Julian storing unsigned transfer options for Harbor?
I kept going.
One of the memory drives contained scanned hotel receipts, offshore transfer authorizations, and appointment schedules that matched dates Adrian had told me Serena was “visiting her mother.”
Another contained board presentation drafts about “temporary capacity restructuring.”
My pulse slowed into something colder.
Not fear anymore.
Recognition.
Julian had not merely been cheating.
He had been preparing for a change in control.
Then I took the red folder out and laid it flat on the desk.
Across the tab, in Julian’s handwriting, were three words:
A.V. CAPACITY FILE
Adrian Vance.
My brother.
I opened it anyway.
The first page was a draft petition for temporary emergency conservatorship.
Petitioner: Serena Rollins Vance, spouse.
Supporting executive declaration: Julian Vance.
Grounds: cognitive instability, impaired judgment, chemical dependency risk, inability to manage significant business interests.
Attached were draft psychiatric summaries, medication logs, a proposed emergency board resolution, and a list of “recommended asset stabilizations” that included appointing Julian interim voting proxy over Adrian’s holdings until recovery.
My throat went dry.
Adrian had struggled after the boating accident. Memory gaps. Headaches. Mood swings. Some of it was real. All of it had been treated.
But this was not treatment.
This was a blueprint.
At the bottom of the third page, clipped separately, was a sealed envelope marked DO NOT COPY.
I opened that too.
Inside was a hearing notice.
Filed, not drafted.
Emergency review in forty-eight hours.
I sat back hard in Julian’s chair.
He had not been merely planning a seizure of power.
He had already moved.
Then something slipped from the back of the folder and landed on the desk.
A pharmacy printout.
Not Adrian’s name.
Serena’s.
Three refills of a sedative that Adrian’s neurologist had explicitly taken him off months ago.
And at the bottom, in blue ink, a note from Julian:
Keep him calm until vote.
I looked at the red folder again.
Not with dread now.
With clarity.
May you like
And when I reached for my phone to call Adrian, my screen lit up first with a message from Serena:
Please don’t tell him yet. He doesn’t know what Julian has been doing.
