Step down and let me steer the group until this circus dies.”
“Are you offering to save the company, Uncle Randall,” I asked, “or to finish stealing it?”
His smile vanished as two federal officers stepped out of my conference room.
We had finished a forensic audit of his division — millions in phantom loans, altered invoices, direct transfers to Sable Capital — and it had pulled in my father’s other brother, Grady Rollins, who had financed the whole operation alongside him.
The rot was old.
Fifteen years earlier, after my grandfather died, Randall and Grady had bribed an estate attorney to alter the family trust, hoping to spark legal chaos, crater the stock, and buy control through straw buyers.
My father had been made chairman on merit, and his brothers had never forgiven being passed over.
When Draper began cooperating to lighten his own sentence, he confirmed it all: Randall had promised him our construction firm in exchange for orchestrating our downfall.
The affair, the leaks, the crash, Lionel’s arrest, my removal — every blow had been aimed at the exact places our family loved each other.
We held one last meeting at my parents’ estate.