Chapter 6 - The DepositionThe deposition room was small, windowless, and smelled of old paper and ozone from the copy machine in the corner. For six hours, I sat across from Sarah Vance and a court reporter whose fingers flew across her machine with a soft, rhythmic click-clack.
I detailed everything.
I told them about the night I turned eighteen, when my father brought a stack of papers to my bedroom and demanded I sign them "for my trust fund." I told them about the time I found the corporate registration for Em-Ben Logistics on his desk when I was twenty, and how he had threatened to throw me out of the house and stop paying my university tuition if I ever looked through his files again.
"Did he ever physically threaten you before the graduation ceremony?" Sarah asked, her eyes fixed on my face.
"Not directly," I said, my fingers tracing the pattern of the wood on the table. "He didn't need to. He used my mother for that. She was the one who would tell me that if I ever embarrassed the family, she would ensure my grandmother's medical bills were no longer paid by the family trust."
"Your grandmother?"
"My mother's mother," I explained. "She was in a private care facility for Alzheimer's. My father funded it. Every time I tried to rebel, every time I refused to sign something or tried to get a job outside of his network, my mother would call me and tell me that grandmother was going to be moved to a state-run facility because of my 'selfishness.' She died two years ago. That was when I started collecting the files."
"Because you no longer had anything they could use to blackmail you," Sarah murmured, her tone softening.
"Yes," I said. "They had nothing left to hold over me. But they didn't know I had already copied the ledger. I spent the last two years waiting—waiting until I had my degree in hand, because I knew the moment I went public, they would try to ruin my academic reputation. I needed that piece of paper. I needed to prove to myself that I had earned something that didn't belong to them."
The door to the deposition room opened, and an agent in a dark suit stepped in, whispered something to Sarah, and handed her a document.
Sarah’s eyes flared as she read it. She looked up at me, a sharp, dangerous light in her eyes.
"The local police just raided your father's mansion in Bosques," she said. "They weren't looking for the ledger. They were responding to an anonymous tip about a domestic disturbance."
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"What happened?" I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Your father is gone, Emily. He fled the house before the police arrived. But they found your brother, Ethan. He was trying to load three suitcases of cash into his car. And in his pocket... they found your grandmother’s old medical records, along with a flight itinerary to Panama under your name, dated for tonight."
