Chapter 6 - The Parasite's Plea-6
Seven days later, my parents and sister walked into the glass conference room of the St. Jude Recovery Center.
They looked like ghosts of their former selves.
Evelyn’s hair was dark at the roots, unstyled and limp. Her expensive clothes were gone, replaced by a cheap off-the-rack sweater that looked three sizes too big. Richard had lost weight, his face sagged with deep lines of exhaustion, and his hands trembled as he pulled out a chair.
Seraphina—the golden child who had never worked a real day in her life—was furious. She sat down, slamming her designer knockoff handbag onto the polished mahogany table, her eyes glaring at me with pure venom.
I sat at the head of the table in an electric wheelchair, wearing a tailored cream blazer over my silk blouse. My lap was covered by a cashmere throw, but my posture was straight, commanding, and absolute. Beside me stood Daniel Cho and Chief Folarin, the senior forensic investigator from the state prosecutor’s office.
"Look at you," Seraphina spat, her voice trembling with hatred. "Sitting in this luxury resort while Mom and Dad are sleeping in a flea-bag motel near the airport! My shop was seized, Elena! My car was repossessed! My friends are laughing at me! How could you do this to your own sister?!"
I didn't answer her. I didn't even look her in the eyes. I simply turned my gaze to Richard.
"Is that why you brought her, Richard?" I asked calmly. "To scream at me?"
"Seraphina, shut up!" Richard snapped, turning on his favorite daughter for the first time in her life. He leaned across the table, his eyes bloodshot, his hands clasped together in a pathetic gesture of pleading. "Elena... please. We are begging you. The state prosecutor is talking about twenty years in federal prison for grand fraud and tax evasion. We don't have money for top defense lawyers! We're broke!"
"You're not broke, Richard," Daniel Cho interrupted, sliding a legal document across the table. "You still have your pension from thirty years ago. It pays eighteen hundred dollars a month. That is more than enough to afford a studio apartment in South Seattle and groceries from the discount market."
"EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS?!" Evelyn shrieked, tears smearing her cheap mascara. "We can't live on eighteen hundred dollars! My skin treatments cost more than that! Richard’s heart medication costs hundreds! Elena, please! You have millions! Millions that we helped you build!"
"You didn't help me build anything, Evelyn," I said, my voice dropping into a register so cold the room seemed to lose five degrees. "My biological mother, Claire Vance, built the IP. I built the company. You simply sat on your velvet sofas in Medina, sipping champagne paid for by my sweat and my late husband's blood."
"We raised you!" Evelyn sobbed, trying to reach across the table to grab my hand. "We gave you a home!"
"You kept me as an insurance policy," I corrected, pulling my hand back out of her reach. "And when I lay broken in a hospital room, begging for your help to protect my helpless children, you told me pickleball was more important."
Seraphina scoffed loudly, crossing her arms. "Oh, come on! The kids were fine! You're just using that as an excuse to destroy our lives because you've always been jealous of me!"
I turned my head slowly, locking my eyes onto Seraphina.
"Jealous of you?" I asked quietly. "Seraphina... do you know why your boutique failed?"
Seraphina blinked, taken aback. "Because the market was bad!"
"No," I said, pulling a thin red folder from Daniel's stack. "It failed because you spent three hundred thousand dollars of my money on personal trips to Cabo, fake inventory orders, and payouts to a married man in Miami."
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Seraphina’s face went dead white. She looked frantically at Richard and Evelyn. "What... what is she talking about?!"
"I ran the full audit on your business accounts last night, Seraphina," I said smoothly. "And what I found doesn't just concern me. It concerns the Internal Revenue Service."
