Chapter 4 - The Debt Collector Unmasked
Victor swallowed hard, sweat beading along his hairline. “Mr. Reyes... Daniel... please. This is a private family misunderstanding! We were joking! Meredith knows how much we love her! We were just teasing her on her sister’s special night!”
“Teasing?” I asked, stepping forward from Daniel’s side. The four hundred guests were dead silent, nobody daring to take a sip of champagne or breathe too loudly. “Was it teasing when you stole $450,000 from my grandmother’s educational trust fund to buy Allison’s first European convertible?”
Allison’s jaw dropped. “That was a gift from Dad!”
“That was my college inheritance, Allison,” I said coldly. “And was it teasing, Victor, when you took the proprietary routing algorithms I spent four years developing and licensed them under Montgomery Logistics to secure the $15 million valuation that funded this very wedding?”
Victor’s eyes widened with genuine, primal terror. “Meredith, be quiet! You signed an internal company release!”
“She signed nothing,” Daniel interrupted, lifting a leather portfolio handed to him by his chief legal officer. “Because those algorithms were never owned by Montgomery Logistics. They were patented under Aegis Sovereign Technologies—a subsidiary of the Reyes Group, created specifically to safeguard Meredith’s intellectual property.”
Daniel flipped open the heavy folder and held up a certified legal notice.
“Victor Montgomery, as of 8:00 AM this morning, Reyes Capital acquired 100% of the non-performing commercial bridge notes issued to Montgomery Logistics by Manhattan Commercial Bank,” Daniel stated calmly. “You currently owe my private fund $42.6 million in matured debt.”
The ballroom felt as though all the oxygen had been vacuumed out.
“Forty-two million?” Preston Caldwell gasped, turning to Victor with panic-stricken eyes. “You told my father your firm was debt-free! You said Montgomery Logistics was doing fifty million in net revenue!”
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“I... I took out short-term operational credit lines!” Victor stammered, his voice breaking. “The markets shifted! It’s a temporary liquidity crunch!”
“It is not temporary,” Daniel said with a cruel, cold smile. “It is final. And I am calling the note due immediately.”
