Chapter 6 - Freezing the Foundation
While I slept under the heavy influence of post-surgical recovery drugs, Luke’s legal and financial task force was systematically dismantling Garrick Kade’s entire existence.
Garrick was a mid-level regional director for a major logistics firm in Austin—a position he bragged about constantly, acting as though he ran a corporate empire. In reality, his salary was modest, and his extravagant lifestyle—the luxury car, the country club membership, the endless remodeling of Hawthorne Lane—was funded almost entirely by two things:
My pre-marital inheritance, which Garrick had slowly coerced me into pooling into a "joint family investment account" over the years.
Embezzlement from minor corporate accounts at his firm, which he believed was hidden behind clever shell companies.
He had severely underestimated Luke.
By 9:00 PM that evening, Luke’s cyber-security firm had already breached the perimeter of Garrick’s financial footprint. They didn't need to hack illegally; they used public corporate registries, banking metadata, and a terrifyingly efficient network of forensic auditors who could trace a single dollar through twelve offshore accounts in under ten minutes.
Garrick sat in the living room of Hawthorne Lane, drinking scotch directly from the bottle while Miriam paced the Persian rug, hyperventilating.
“What do you mean our accounts are frozen?!” Miriam shrieked, waving her phone in the air. “I tried to pay the grocery bill, and the card was declined for fraud! Fraud? Me?”
“Stop yelling, Mom!” Garrick snapped, his face flushed red with alcohol and panic. He slammed his glass down onto the coffee table, sloshing amber liquid across the wood. “I’m calling corporate legal right now. Some prick in a suit showed up and served me an injunction, but this is a mistake! My brother-in-law is just some computer geek from out of state! He can't touch us!”
Just as Garrick reached for his phone on the table, it lit up with an incoming call from an unknown, encrypted number.
Garrick snatched it up, pressing answer with a sneer. “Listen to me, whoever you are—you’ve made a massive mistake, and my attorneys are going to sue you into the stone age—”
“Save your breath, Garrick,” Luke’s calm, chilling voice came through the speaker.
Garrick froze. The color drained from his face as he recognized the voice of the man who had ordered his security detail to pin him against an SUV earlier that day.
“You…” Garrick choked out. “What did you do to my accounts?”
“I froze them,” Luke replied smoothly, the sound of a fountain pen scratching across paper audible in the background. “Along with your corporate expense accounts at Apex Logistics. Turns_out, skimming four thousand dollars a month from client transit logs leaves a very obvious digital paper trail, Garrick. I forwarded the complete forensic audit to your company’s CEO and the FBI’s financial crimes division about twenty minutes ago.”
Garrick stumbled backward, his knees hitting the sofa cushions. He collapsed onto the couch, dropping the phone.
“No… no, that’s impossible,” Garrick whispered, staring blankly at the wall. “I covered those tracks for two years…”
“You covered them from local cops who take donuts as bribes,” Luke said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp register. “You didn't cover them from a man who owns the cyber-security infrastructure your company hires for penetration testing. By morning, you won't just be divorced; you’ll be facing federal wire fraud charges.”
“Sarah!” Garrick suddenly screamed into the fallen phone, his voice cracking with desperate panic. “Sarah, put me on the phone with my wife! Tell her to call her brother off! We’re family! We’re Christians!”
“My sister’s sleeping,” Luke replied coldly. “And the only thing you and your mother are going to be praying for tomorrow morning is a federal judge with a sense of mercy.”
May you like
The line clicked dead.
Miriam stared at her son in absolute horror as the reality of their destruction finally set in. The house of cards they had built on cruelty, control, and exploitation was collapsing into dust.
