I took the thick red-backed document from the stack at my side and dropped it onto the glass table.
“Read the title.”
His gaze fell. Notice of Default and Immediate Foreclosure.
My father spoke then, but softly now, which was far worse than shouting. “My firm has already purchased your full debt portfolio. We hold every material note. You are in breach. The acceleration clauses are active.”
I finished it. “There is no bailout. There was never going to be a bailout. We did not come to save you. We came to collect.”
The board erupted. Questions, accusations, legal threats, panicked protests. Randolph staggered back. Prescott looked like a man who had opened a parachute and found stone.
“We own the debt,” I said over the noise. “We are foreclosing on this building, on the commercial portfolio, and on the residence secured against the debt. Your operating accounts are frozen. Your transfer privileges are suspended. And because asset dissipation is now a credible risk, injunctions have already been filed.”
Prescott’s chair scraped back. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t. Violet!”
I turned to look at him fully for the first time since entering the room. He saw then that I meant it. Not as revenge, though it was that too. As fact.
Everything in him collapsed at once. He stumbled around the table, dropped to his knees on the marble, and reached for me.
“Please,” he said, sobbing now, the kind of ugly crying men like Prescott reserve for themselves because they consider their own pain sacred. “Please, Violet. I was wrong. I was under pressure. I didn’t mean it. I love you. I swear to God, I love you. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me with nothing.”
The board watched. My father watched. Randolph watched.
I looked down at the man who had split my lip less than a day earlier and listened to him call poverty death. He had never loved me. He had loved what I did for him. He had loved the unearned confidence of standing beside someone competent while claiming the credit.
I stepped back. His hands slid off my legs.
“Get away from me,” I said.
He reached again. I slapped him. The sound cracked through the room like a gunshot. His head snapped sideways. He fell against the chair leg and then to the floor, staring up at me in shock so pure it looked almost childlike.
“That,” I said evenly, “was for the anniversary.”
No one rushed to help him. That, more than anything, told me the spell was over.