Chapter 9 - The Living Will

Victoria backed away, her face twisting into an ugly, bitter sneer. "You have nothing! The shares are locked in legal probate! Even if you contest the ownership, it will take years in court! By then, I will have bled this company dry and left you with hollow shells and insurmountable debts!"

"Not quite, Victoria," I said, reaching into my jacket pocket.

I pulled out a small, metallic silver thumb drive, worn around the edges, suspended on a silver chain that had once hung around my sister’s neck until the day she passed.

"Evelyn knew you," I said softly, feeling the warmth of the metal between my fingers. "She knew Robert’s greed. She knew your ruthless narcissism. She knew that the moment she closed her eyes, you would try to devour her sons."

I tossed the drive onto the table toward Arthur. "Plug it in, Arthur. It's encrypted with Evelyn's biometric voiceprint. It was scheduled to auto-decrypt on the boys' eighteenth birthday. Noah, Mason... give Arthur the passphrase."

Noah and Mason spoke in unison, reciting the phrase their mother used to whisper to them every night before bed: *"Where love remains, the truth endures."*

Arthur plugged the drive into the master laptop. The boardroom monitors blinked, and suddenly, the image of my sister Evelyn filled every screen in the room.

She was sitting in her sunlit living room, thin and fragile from illness, but her eyes were burning with an undeniable, fierce intelligence.

*"If you are watching this,"* Evelyn’s recorded voice resonated through the room, clear and steady, *"then my sons have reached adulthood, and my sister Sarah has kept her promise to raise them with honor. And if you are watching this in the presence of Victoria and Robert Sterling, it means my worst fears have come to pass."*

May you like

My fiancé let his friend chop off my mother’s waist-length

My husband spent the night with another woman

My husband brought his mistress to our nine-year-old daughter’s dance

Victoria took a step back, her back hitting the floor-to-ceiling glass window overlooking the city lights.

*"I hereby revoke all previous powers of attorney,"* Evelyn declared from the grave, staring directly into the lens. *"I invoke the Sterling Dynastic Trust Clause 9. All voting rights, executive powers, and treasury controls are immediately and indivisibly transferred to Sarah Sterling as legal guardian, transitioning unconditionally to Mason and Noah Sterling upon their eighteenth birthday. Any transaction executed without their combined signatures is null, void, and criminally fraudulent."*