Chương 6 - Divide and Conquer
Eleanor left the office in ruins, but the battle had only shifted fronts.
At seven o'clock that evening, while the rain lashed against the windows of my downtown penthouse, my private cell phone rang. It wasn't Brandon or Eleanor.
It was Ethan.
I hesitated before answering. Ethan had always been the quiet one, the younger brother who shrank into the background while Brandon absorbed all the praise and Vanessa absorbed all the attention. When I had walked away from the family three years ago, Ethan hadn't sent nasty messages, but he hadn't reached out either. He had stayed safe inside the Vance orbit, taking a modest salary at an environmental non-profit that my father had once advised.
I swiped the screen. "Ethan."
"Elena," his voice sounded thin, cracked with exhaustion. "Are you alone?"
"I am. Why?"
"Can I come over? Please. I'm sitting in my car outside your building. I don't know who else to go to."
I paused for a second. "Tell the front desk I’m buzzing you up to thirty-two."
Ten minutes later, Ethan stood in my entryway. He looked like a ghost. His hair was messy, his eyes bloodshot, and he was clutching a battered leather messenger bag to his chest as if it were a life raft. He looked around my open-concept living room—the wide oak floors, the floor-to-ceiling glass, the low-profile grey linen sofas—with genuine bewilderment.
"It doesn't look like what Vanessa said," he murmured, taking off his damp coat.
"Vanessa hasn't set foot in my home," I said, leading him toward the kitchen island. "Sit down. Do you want tea?"
"Bourbon, if you have it," he said, slumping onto a leather barstool.
I poured two fingers of small-batch bourbon into a heavy crystal glass and pushed it across the marble counter. Ethan drank half of it in a single swallow, letting out a ragged shudder.
"Mother called Brandon from your office," Ethan said, staring down into the amber liquid. "She was hysterical. Brandon went ballistic. He threw a crystal decanter through the dining room mirror at Broadmoor. He said you were trying to destroy the family, and that he was going to take everything you had before you could touch him."
"He can try," I said evenly. "He has no legal standing."
"He has Vanessa," Ethan replied, pulling the messenger bag onto his lap. "Elena, you don't understand how sick this has gotten. Vanessa didn't just write that blog post. She’s been recording you."
I froze, my hand hovering over the bottle of bourbon. "What?"
"Two years ago," Ethan explained, his voice shaking, "when you sold Aegis, Vanessa hired a private digital security firm to pull your old phone records and email metadata from when you were still using Dad’s home server during college. Brandon paid for it using the family trust."
Ethan unzipped the bag and pulled out a thick stack of printed transcripts and an external hard drive.
"They took fragments of old emails you wrote to Dad when you were twenty-two," Ethan said, pushing the documents toward me. "Emails where you were venting about client frustrations, where you made sarcastic jokes about enterprise encryption flaws in the early versions of your code. Vanessa has an editor splicing those audio clips from your old podcasts and keynotes to make it sound like you knowingly sold flawed cybersecurity architecture to the defense contractor."
A cold, methodical stillness washed over me. This was no longer just petty family greed or reckless borrowing. This was corporate sabotage and attempted extortion. If those spliced files were leaked to the defense industry press, the Department of Defense would be forced to open an immediate compliance audit on Aegis’s legacy systems. Even if I was completely innocent, the reputational fallout would freeze my current venture capital funds and tie me up in federal depositions for years.
"Why are you giving this to me, Ethan?" I asked, looking him directly in the eyes. "You could have stayed quiet. If Brandon pulled this off, he might have salvaged enough to keep your stipend alive."
Ethan let out a bitter, self-loathing laugh. "What stipend, Elena? Brandon stopped paying my graduate tuition six months ago. He told me the trust was tied up in high-yield investments. I’ve been driving Uber at night in Denver just to pay my rent while Mother bragged at the country club about Brandon buying me a townhouse."
He leaned forward, his hands trembling against the marble counter.
"I was a coward, Elena," Ethan whispered, tears welling in his eyes. "For fifteen years, I watched them treat you like dirt because you wouldn't bow down to Mother. I watched Brandon steal Dad’s watches, Dad’s cars, Dad’s money, while Mother made excuses for him. I stayed quiet because I thought if I played along, they’d love me. But they don't love me. They don't love anyone. Brandon only cares about his reflection, and Mother only cares about the myth."
I reached out and placed my hand over his trembling fingers. They were ice-cold. For the first time in fifteen years, I saw my little brother—not the spoiled child of Oakridge brunch, but the scared kid who used to hide in my garage while our parents screamed at each other in the dining room.
"You're not a coward anymore, Ethan," I said softly. "You brought me the hard drive."
"Is it enough?" he asked, wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve. "Can you stop them?"
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"I don't just want to stop them, Ethan," I said, picking up the external drive and sliding it into my pocket. "I’m going to make sure Brandon and Vanessa never have the power to extort or ruin another human being for the rest of their lives."
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