Chapter 2 - The Motive of a Monster
"Why?" Ethan asked, his voice barely a hollow whisper. "Why would you do something so evil?"
Sophia backed away, her back hitting the heavy oak door of the study. The rest of the family—Ethan’s sister, his uncle, and a few cousins who had gathered for Sunday dinner—were crowding the doorway, staring at her with naked disgust. The victim act evaporated instantly. When cornered, the terrified wife vanished, replaced by the calculating predator Ethan had been blindly married to for three years.
"Because he’s cutting us out, Ethan!" Sophia screamed, pointing an accusing, trembling finger at Richard. "I saw the draft of the new will on his desk yesterday! He’s liquidating the family company and putting ninety percent of the estate into a philanthropic trust! All of it! The houses, the investments, the offshore accounts—gone!"
Richard slowly reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a clean linen handkerchief, gently dabbing the corner of his mouth where his son's ring had cut his lip. "It is my money, Sophia. I built that company from the ground up, fifty years before you even knew how to spell the word 'luxury.' I intended to leave Ethan a very comfortable trust, but I refuse to fund a lifetime of your endless, greedy vanity."
"So you tried to frame him for assault?" Ethan demanded, his voice rising to a deafening roar. "You tried to send my father to prison over money?!"
"I wasn't going to send him to prison!" Sophia shot back, her eyes wild with desperate justification. "I was going to use the assault charge to have him declared mentally incompetent! The lawyers said if we could prove he was suffering from violent, senile dementia, we could invoke power of attorney and take control of the estate before he signed the new will! I did this for us, Ethan! I did this to protect our future!"
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The sheer audacity of her confession hung in the air like poison. She hadn’t just wanted money; she had intricately planned to strip an elderly man of his dignity, his freedom, and his reputation. She wanted to lock him in a psychiatric facility to buy her next sports car.
Ethan turned to look at his father. Richard was standing straight, looking at Ethan with a mixture of profound sorrow and quiet pity. Ethan looked at his own hand—the hand he had used to strike the man who had taught him how to walk, how to ride a bike, and how to be a man. A suffocating wave of nausea hit Ethan so hard he almost collapsed to his knees.
