The heavy crystal water pitcher was six inches away from crushing Brooke’s skull when my right hand shot out and caught Chad Sterling’s wrist in mid-air like a hydraulic vise.
For the last six weeks inside that locked basement gym in Stamford, every single rep I had pushed through the blinding agony in my lower spine had been fueled by the memory of Chad patting my cheek in my wheelchair and calling me a bankrupt cripple. I twisted his arm inward until the bones in his forearm popped, forcing his fingers open so the crystal pitcher crashed harmlessly onto the mahogany stage floor, splashing ice water across Brooke’s white Designer heels.
Before Chad could even scream, I drove my left forearm straight into his chest and slammed him face-first across the oak podium—knocking the wind completely out of his lungs right in front of the live microphone.
"Get off me! He’s assaulting me!" Chad wheezed, his cheek pressed into a puddle of spilled champagne as Special Agent Nolan Riggs and four armed FBI tactical officers vaulted up the stage stairs, yanking Chad’s arms behind his back and snapping heavy steel handcuffs around his wrists.
"Chadwick Vance Sterling, you are under federal arrest for conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire across state lines, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and willful failure to remit fourteen million dollars in federal payroll taxes under Internal Revenue Code Section 7202," Agent Riggs barked, his voice booming through the podium microphone so every single billionaire and Wall Street Journal reporter in the ballroom heard every word.
Beside him, two female federal marshals grabbed Brooke by her bare shoulders as she tried to crawl backward across the stage in her white sequined gown.
"Wait! Don't put those on me!" Brooke shrieked as the cold steel cuffs clicked shut over her diamond tennis bracelet. She twisted frantically toward me, mascara running in thick black rivers down her cheeks as she dropped to her knees on the stage carpet. "Ethan! Baby, please tell them! You know how psychotic Chad is—you just saw him try to kill me! He threatened my life while you were in the hospital! He forced me to sign that Power of Attorney! Ethan, we were together for four years, please don't let them send me to federal prison!"
I looked down at the woman who, seven nights ago, had unlocked the brakes on my wheelchair with her Louboutin heel, shoved me into a brass pillar, and laughed while telling a room full of strangers that my wheel grease smelled like a hospital basement.
"You’re right, Brooke—we were together for four years," I said calmly, crouching down just enough to look her dead in the eye while thirty press cameras flashed furiously from the pit below the stage. "And three days ago, my federal wiretap caught you laughing inside my stolen Porsche while you ordered a nurse to inject an air bubble into my heart so you could spend my fifty-million-dollar life insurance policy. Where you’re going, you won't have to smell wheelchair grease ever again—just Clorox and concrete at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution."
I stood back up and stepped over to Chad, who was trembling violently as two agents hauled him to his feet. I nodded once to Assistant U.S. Attorney Clara Lin, who held up a signed Federal Asset Forfeiture and Estate Restitution Order for the FBI evidence photographer.
Reaching down to Chad’s handcuffed left wrist, I unclasped my late father’s 1998 Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar watch and slid it smoothly off his arm, slipping it onto my own wrist where it belonged. Then I reached into my tuxedo pocket, pulled out a crisp, folded five-dollar bill—the exact same bill Brooke’s mother had tossed into the muddy gutter between my wheelchair tires last Saturday night—and tucked it neatly into Chad’s breast pocket.
"What was it you told me last week, Chad?" I murmured, patting his stinging cheek the exact way he had patted mine. "Crazy how cheap family heirlooms get when your credit score drops into the four-hundreds, right? Put that five bucks toward your prison commissary account at Terre Haute. You’re going to need it for ramen noodles over the next thirty years."
