Chapter 39 - The Hidden Beneficiary
The board members sat in stunned silence as Vance was handcuffed and read his rights. His arrogant facade crumbled instantly, his knees giving out as the officers dragged him toward the exit.
"Wait!" Vance yelled desperately, thrashing against the officers’ grip as he reached the doorway. "Elaine! You don't know what you're doing! Bernice isn't acting alone! If you freeze those accounts, they will come for you! The money in Zurich... it isn't hers! It belongs to—"
Ruiz shoved Vance through the doorway, cutting off his frantic cries as the elevator doors closed.
The boardroom was dead silent. The remaining directors, men and women who had spent years treating me as Bernice’s quiet, submissive shadow, looked at me with a mixture of terror and awe.
I took the seat at the head of the table—the seat Bernice had occupied for nearly three decades.
"Gentlemen," I said calmly, looking each of them in the eye. "An emergency audit of every asset, account, and subsidiary under Bradley Holdings begins right now. Any board member who attempts to delete files, transfer funds, or contact Bernice Bradley will be prosecuted as an accomplice to felony treason and fraud. Do I make myself clear?"
No one dared to speak. One by one, the directors nodded in submissive agreement.
An hour later, Julian and I sat alone in my father’s former private office, reviewing the financial records unlocked by the district attorney’s forensic team.
"Elaine, look at this," Julian said, pointing to a ledger entry from twelve years ago on the master computer terminal.
A massive sum—over fifty million dollars—had been transferred out of Arthur Bradley’s original estate immediately following his death. But the recipient wasn't Bernice.
The account was held in a private Swiss bank under the name: *Project Belladonna.*
"Belladonna?" I frowned, leaning over his shoulder. "That's nightshade. A poison."
"And look at the authorized signature," Julian whispered, clicking on the scanned signature card from Zurich.
It wasn't Bernice’s elegant, cursive hand. Nor was it Lucas’s hurried scrawl.
The signature was bold, jagged, and signed with initials that sent a cold shudder down my spine: *R.B.*
"Rupert Bradley," I gasped, stepping back from the desk. "My father's older brother. The uncle who allegedly died in a plane crash twenty years ago."
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Julian stared at the screen, his jaw set. "If Rupert Bradley didn't die in that crash... then Bernice wasn't the mastermind behind this empire's destruction. She was just the housekeeper cleaning up the blood."
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