Chapter 8 - Frozen Assets and Desperate Begging
Within twenty minutes of the boardroom meeting concluding, Rowan was escorted out of the Crestview building by four armed security guards. He wasn’t even allowed to carry his personal belongings; everything was packed into a cardboard box and searched in the lobby.
As he stood on the crowded Manhattan sidewalk in the pouring rain, clutch-holding his cardboard box, his cell phone rang incessantly.
It was his private bank.
“Mr. Miller?” a cold customer service representative spoke. “We are notifying you that pursuant to a federal freezing order initiated by the Department of Justice regarding account fraud, all personal checking, savings, and brokerage accounts under your name have been restricted. All debit and credit cards have been deactivated.”
“Wait! You can’t freeze all my accounts!” Rowan screamed into the phone over the roar of city traffic. “I need to pay for my hotel! I have no cash!”
“You will need to contact the court-appointed receiver, sir. Have a good day.”
Click.
Rowan stood in the rain, soaked to the bone, watching high-powered executives and yellow cabs rush past. For the first time in his pampered, arrogant life, he had nothing. No job, no money, no home, and no reputation.
Desperate, he hailed a cab, only to realize he didn’t even have five dollars in cash to pay the fare. He had to walk forty blocks through the freezing rain to the budget motel near Queens where his mother was staying after being kicked out of the country club.
When he finally pushed open the motel room door, the sight that greeted him was pure misery.
Selina sat on a stained floral bedspread, wearing a cheap nylon bathrobe, her mascara smeared across her face, surrounded by takeout containers.
“Rowan!” she cried out, jumping up. “Did you fix it? Did you talk to Marcus? Tell me we’re going back to the townhouse!”
Rowan dropped the cardboard box onto the floor. He collapsed onto the cheap motel chair and put his hands over his face, weeping uncontrollably.
“It’s over, Mom,” Rowan sobbed. “It’s all over. She took everything. She knew about the Belize accounts. She knew about the consulting firm. She presented everything to the board.”
Selina shrieked, clutching her head. “The Belize accounts?! How could she know about that?! You said those were untraceable!”
“She’s a senior forensic accountant, Mom!” Rowan screamed back, his grief turning into blinding fury. “You called her an uneducated nobody! You told me to ignore her! You told me she was dramatic! She’s Gideon Sterling’s only daughter and the best auditor in the state!”
“You’re blaming me?!” Selina shrieked, lunging at him with her fingernails. “You bought that sixty-thousand-dollar watch! You wanted to look like a big shot! I gave up my life for you, and you brought a viper into our family!”
They screamed at each other in that dingy motel room for an hour, tearing apart thirty years of toxic co-dependency until both were hoarse, exhausted, and broken.
Finally, Selina collapsed back onto the bed, panting. “We have to fight back, Rowan. We have the baby.”
Rowan looked up, his red eyes wide. “What?”
“Leo,” Selina whispered, a sinister gleam returning to her desperate eyes. “He is Gideon Sterling’s only grandchild. The sole heir to an eight-billion-dollar fortune. Under New York family law, you have presumptive parental rights. If we file an emergency custody petition and demand visitation and child support, they will have to pay us millions just to make us go away.”
Rowan stared at his mother. The sheer depravity of the idea should have repulsed him. But stripped of his pride, his money, and his future, the greed took over once more.
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“You think... you think that will work?” Rowan asked, his voice trembling.
“Gideon Sterling would rather burn a hundred million dollars than let a custody scandal hit the tabloids,” Selina sneered. “We hire a contingency lawyer. We sue for full custody. We claim Phoebe is mentally unstable. We make them pay.”
