Chapter 7 - The Circle of Wolves
Carmen and Javier were shoved out into the blistering Texas heat on McKinney Avenue, the elevator keys confiscated, their access cards shredded before their eyes. But Alexander’s retribution was far from finished.
Sofia had told her mother the exact truth: Carmen had not acted alone. Six other women had stood in that hotel suite—wealthy, arrogant Dallas socialites who had laughed while Sofia was brutalized, mocking her tears, holding her arms pinned behind her back while Carmen took her swings.
Alexander sat in the back of his armored Maybach, reading through the dossier provided by his intelligence director. Six names. Six prominent families whose fortunes rested on fragile pillars of debt, social reputation, and corporate nepotism.
“Target them in order,” Alexander ordered into his phone.
The first was Beatrice Holloway, Carmen’s closest confidante and the wife of Thomas Holloway, CEO of Holloway Logistics. At 11:15 AM, Thomas Holloway was summoned to an emergency board meeting. Alexander Sterling’s investment group had acquired a forty-nine percent voting stake in his firm overnight through hostile debt swaps. The board delivered an ultimatum: terminate Thomas immediately or face total liquidation. By noon, Beatrice’s husband was stripped of his stock options, his pension frozen, and his company car repossessed in the corporate parking lot.
The second and third were sisters, Victoria and Evelyn Vance (no relation to Dr. Vance), who operated high-end art galleries in the Design District. At 1:00 PM, agents from the Texas Comptroller’s Office arrived with search warrants, discovering that the sisters had been laundering undocumented cash transactions for Carmen’s offshore accounts. Both galleries were padlocked before lunch ended.
The remaining three women—wives of prominent developers and civic leaders—received identical black envelopes delivered by private couriers at their country clubs.
Inside each envelope were three items:
1. High-resolution photographs of Sofia’s brutalized face.
2. An audio recording of their laughter from the hotel suite.
3. A draft of a federal civil lawsuit naming them individually as co-conspirators in human trafficking, violent battery, and extortion, alongside an explicit notification that their husbands’ commercial credit lines had been purchased by Sterling Global.
By 2:30 PM, the phones at Elena’s apartment began ringing off the hook.
The very women who had held Sofia down, who had spat on her wedding gown and called her a peasant, were now weeping into Elena’s voicemail, begging for forgiveness, offering millions of dollars in restitution, and swearing they had been coerced by Carmen.
Elena listened to one of the messages, her hand shaking with righteous vindication. She looked across the room at Sofia, who was resting on the sofa under a soft cashmere blanket, the swelling on her face beginning to subside under medical care.
May you like
Elena pressed the delete button without a word.
***
