Chapter 1: The Cost of Spilled Milk
“Sign it, or you’ll never work in this city again.”
My father’s voice wasn’t a shout; it was a serpentine hiss, vibrating with a lethal mixture of desperation and rage. He whispered those words while the heel of his Italian loafer ground into my bleeding hand.
Seconds earlier, the boardroom had been filled with the polite murmur of twenty high-net-worth angel investors, the clinking of crystal flutes, and the smell of expensive cologne. Now, the room was a vacuum of horrified silence. The only sound was the heavy, wet thud of my heart against my ribs and the slight creak of leather as Anthony Hargrove put his full weight onto my fingers.
He had punched me. A closed-fist strike to the cheekbone, delivered with the casual brutality one might use to silence a barking dog. And he had done it because I, his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, had refused to pick up a pen and assume liability for eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars of my brother’s debt.
