The silence in the master bedroom grew heavy enough to suffocate, broken only by the rapid, shallow sound of Linda’s own breathing. Her reflection in the vanity mirror looked like a caricature of the woman she used to be… pale and desperate, clutching a smartphone as if it were a lifeline rather than the instrument of her execution."What do you mean by that, Julius?" Linda asked, her voice cracking slightly before she forced it back into a cold, defensive rigidity. "You are our family attorney. You have been for two decades. What do you mean it is an impossible route?"On the other end of the line, the rustle of papers signalled that Julius Vane was already packing up his desk, completely unbothered by the rising panic in his client’s voice. When he spoke, his tone was entirely devoid of professional warmth, replaced by the flat, clinical calculation of a man who no longer saw any financial benefit in being polite."I mean exactly what I said, Linda," Julius replied, his voice ech

The illusion of choice had been completely stripped away. When even Julius Vane, a man who had eaten at their dinner table, a man who had accepted millions in retainer fees over the decades, had hung up on them without a backward glance, it meant the social quarantine was absolute. They were toxic assets. The entire city knew that Jack Rothwell was holding the axe, and no one was going to risk their own throat to stand beside the Smiths.The master bedroom, once a sanctuary of absolute control, now felt like a cage shrinking around its prisoner. Linda sat down quietly in despair on the edge of her mattress, her hands resting limply in her lap as she thought about the entire situation.The weight of Julius Vane’s final words hung in the air like a physical fog. Every avenue they had mapped out, every aggressive strategy she had desperately clung to over the past twelve hours, had been systematically dismantled by a man who understood the brutal architecture of power in this city fa