Chapter 6 - The Emergency Room Interrogation
The sterile white lights of Mount Sinai’s recovery ward hummed quietly above my bed. My newborn daughter was sleeping soundly in the clear plastic bassinet beside me, her tiny chest rising and falling in a steady, peaceful rhythm. But outside my door, the calm exterior of the hospital was entirely shattered.
Special Agent Daniel Reeves stood in the doorway, talking in hushed, urgent tones with a senior detective from the NYPD Financial Crimes Bureau.
As Reeves stepped back into the room, his face was carved from granite.
“How are you holding up, Ms. Morgan?” Reeves asked, softening his voice slightly as he pulled a chair up beside my bed.
“I’m surviving,” I said, my voice hoarse from the exhaustion of labor and the adrenaline crash that followed. “What’s happening out there? Did Ethan actually get booked?”
“Booked and locked in a holding cell downtown,” Reeves replied, pulling a heavy case folder from under his arm. “His defense attorney tried to file an emergency writ claiming the corporate filings were a ‘clerical error’ made by a third-party accountant. But we traced the digital IP addresses used to upload the forged transfer requests. They lead straight to a secure terminal inside your parents' summer home in the Hamptons.”
My blood ran cold. “My parents knew?”
“Not just your parents,” Reeves said grimly, sliding a printed photograph across the table. “Take a look at this.”
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It was a screenshot of a high-resolution security camera feed from a private bank in Zurich, dated four months ago. Standing side-by-side at the teller counter, signing authorization documents for a multi-million-dollar shell company transfer using my corporate identity, were my brother Ethan and a man I recognized instantly from the financial news: Viktor Vance, a notorious offshore financier tied directly to the Meridian Syndicate.
“They didn’t just want your penthouse, Claire,” Reeves said quietly. “They needed your clean, unblemished credit history as a tech-company founder to launder fifty million dollars in syndicate assets. Your apartment was just the collateral they used to force your compliance.”
