His Fake Bride to Claim

Chapter three:The clause

There was trouble.Real trouble.Vivian Shaw had been the Calloway-Reyes family's attorney for eleven years, and that was just long enough to know that when Sebastian called her at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday evening saying come alone, tell no one, use the back entrance.She found him by the tall windows of his office, looking down at the city, the lights half-dimmed, the drawer beneath his desk already unlocked, the documents sitting squared and silent on the desk where he'd set them back out for her."Lock the door," he said, without turning around.She did. Then she crossed the room, and Sebastian slid the stack toward her without a word."Read it. Tell me I'm wrong about what this is."She picked up the first page and froze instantly."Wh.. what… the hell? Where… where did this come from?" she stuttered."Well apparently, someone left it at the front desk and not even one of the CCTV’s caught them.” he replied, a tinge of disappointment in his voice.“Oh s**t… but isn’t that weird? Could it be an inside job?” she asked, picking up another page.“It better not be. But I’ve asked the security to handle it and for their sake, I hope whatever it is gets fixed. Or else…” his voice trailed off.“Let's allow them to handle that and focus on the most important thing right now.” “Fine. Here you go. I have three weeks to resign from the board and kill the Hartwell deal, or this goes to the press, the board, and the SEC."Vivian read in silence, flipping pages trying to hide how alarmed she was. Sebastian watched her face anyway. He'd known her long enough to read what she didn't say."Please, tell me it's nothing," he said. "Tell me these numbers don't mean what I think they mean."“Well, I can tell you they're fabricated." She set the stack down, exhaling slowly. "The formatting's close to perfect but whoever built this sure doesn't have access to the real account structure because three of these transaction codes don't exist in our system. So it's good but not perfect."Relief washed through Sebastian’s veins."But that's not the problem." She said pulling "Even if we prove that every page of this is false — which we can if given enough time — the demand isn't really asking you to disprove it. It's asking you to resign quietly and I need you to understand what happens if you do that.""Okay, I'm listening." he responded, turning to face her."Your father's succession clause. The one in the original trust documents, that was drafted long before you were born." She began carefully, not sure how this would land.“... states that if a sitting Calloway-Reyes board member resigns from the board under any circumstance, it is interpreted as 'voluntary distancing from company leadership,' therefore control of your shares automatically goes to the next eligible family trustee for a mandatory five-year review period."Cold shivers ran through Sebastian's spine "Oh. Wow. Let’s say I agree to follow this threat, Who's the next eligible trustee?"Vivian hesitated."Legally, it's your mother but practically it will be whoever she assigns to act in her place, since she's never held an operational board seat herself." She paused. "Sebastian, your mother has never told me who she'd give that position to if the need ever arises and I’ve never asked because I always assumed it would never come to this."He sat down slowly across from her, the full size of the trap finally visible. If he complies, he doesn't just lose his seat, he hands over full control of the company to someone his own mother chose, someone he had no say in, for five years he couldn't get back. And if he refuses, then the fabricated evidence goes public regardless, dragging the family through the same scandal mud his father had spent a lifetime keeping them out of.Now, there was no version of this where silence actually protected anyone."So whoever sent this," he said slowly, "didn't just want me gone. They wanted this specific outcome. Which means they know everything that has been buried in a trust document that's meant to be sealed.""Yes," Vivian said quietly. "Which narrows things down considerably. This isn't some outside operator who got lucky with templates and a stolen seal. It might be an inside job. Someone in your circle desperately wants you out of the way and they would do anything to achieve that.""I need a list," he said, anger quietly seeping into his voice, "Get me the name of everyone who's ever had access to that clause. Every single one of them."Vivian didn't answer right away.She was looking at her phone, which had lit up on the desk between them, her expression changing and Sebastian's stomach dropped before she'd even said a word."Vivian.""Ah, yes. It's one of the paralegals," she said slowly, still reading. "She just texted me from the office. Apparently a board member just reached out asking if we could 'privately confirm the authenticity' of a document they'd been shown."Sebastian's whole body went still. "Which board member?"Vivian’s eyes rose up to meet his, and for the first time since she'd walked into the room, she looked genuinely frightened."Graham Whitfield," she said.“s**t!” he cursed under his breath, trying hard to get himself to take deep gulps of air because if he didn’t, the alternative was standing up and putting his fist through the window behind him, and he wasn’t about to let Vivian Shaw watch him come apart in his own office.Graham Whitfield. That bastard! Whitfield had been circling the Hartwell merger for the better part of a year, making polite, needling comments at every board dinner about how "family companies struggle to modernize," with a smile on his face like the insult was a compliment if you looked closely. His own shipping conglomerate had been losing ground to Calloway-Reyes Maritime for more than a decade, and everyone in the industry knew he hated losing to a family that, in his words, "inherited its advantage instead of working hard for it." "So he already has a copy of one of these pages? How convenient…" Sebastian said flatly, forced into calm by sheer will. "Sebastian—""I'm fine." The hell he wasn't. His knuckles had gone pale from squeezing his hand so tightly together he could feel his pulse rushing to his ears. "I need to know exactly what Whitfield knows before he makes a run for it."Vivian was already typing, her thumb moving fast across the screen, when she went completely still, Sebastian's chest tightened again."Sebastian," she said quietly. "The paralegal says Whitfield didn't just ask us to confirm the document.""What again?"She turned the phone around so he could read it himself."He's asking if the firm will represent him in an emergency shareholder motion that would be filed against you, first thing tomorrow morning.”