“You have five minutes to sign over your hotel empire, Greina. Five minutes, or I make the call to have you involuntarily committed for a severe mental breakdown.”
My father didn’t even blink as he threatened to lock me away in a padded room just to steal my company. He sat at the head of the mahogany table, swirling his vintage Bordeaux, looking at me with the same dispassionate gaze one might use when deciding which horse to put down. He thought he was holding a gun to my head. He thought I was the same trembling twenty-four-year-old girl he had exiled five years ago.
He did not realize I was the one holding the bullets.
I waited for him to finish his sip—the last expensive thing he would ever drink on his own dime—and set my silver fork down with a deliberate, echoing clink.
“You are mistaken, Dad,” I said, my voice steady, betraying none of the adrenaline coursing through my veins. “I didn’t come here to negotiate a surrender. I came to serve an eviction notice.”
I reached under my chair, my fingers brushing the cold leather of the heavy legal binder I had been hiding, and slammed it onto the table between us. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent dining room.
But to understand how we got to this moment—the moment the king fell—you have to go back four hours.
