Chapter 218: The Cost Of Greed
Von’s hand was already moving toward his pocket before Xenia had even finished speaking.
He pulled out his phone with the trembling, mechanical urgency of a man who needed to disprove something before reality had the chance to fully settle in.
His thumb jabbed at the screen.
[Jones Wright - Investment.]
The contact he had trusted, the contact he had transferred money to, the contact who was supposed to make him richer.
Taking a deep breath, he pressed call.
The line rang.
Once, twice, five times.
Then silence.
There was no answer.
Von’s jaw tightened.
"No," he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. "He’s just in a meeting. He’s busy. He’s a serious investor. Of course he’s going to be busy."
He called again.
Two rings, but nothing came out...
A third attempt.
One ring, then the call ended abruptly. Not missed, but rejected.
The distinction hit harder than any spoken response could have.
Von immediately dialed again.
An error tone sounded; the call never connected.
He had been blocked.
Von froze upon noticing that.
The screen remained illuminated in his hand, displaying the cold, indifferent error message.
Final and absolute. He desperately wished that what he was seeing wasn’t the case, but eyes don’t lie.
What he was seeing was the digital equivalent of a door not merely being shut, but locked from the other side.
"FUCK!" he cursed. The word tore itself out of him, raw, loud, and ugly.
The voice of a man watching certainty collapse beneath his feet.
His arm twitched as though he intended to hurl the phone across the office.
At the last second, he stopped himself.
His fingers tightened around the device until his knuckles turned white.
The profile picture of Jones Wright still sat behind the error notification; the expensive suit, the diamond watch, the Audi, the perfect AI-generated smile.
Now that the illusion had shattered, it looked exactly like what it was. A fake. An obvious fake.
The kind of fake that would have taken only seconds to identify if the viewer hadn’t desperately wanted it to be real.
Silence settled over the office.
Von’s expression shifted through several stages. First anger, then disbelief, then embarrassment.
And finally something far heavier: understanding. The slow, nauseating realization that the money was gone, the transfers, the accounts, the promises, the profits that never existed.
The numbers he began muttering under his breath were not small numbers.
Transaction dates, transfer amounts, account references; each figure sounded larger than the last.
Each one deepened the growing pit in his stomach.
Across the desk, Vivian finally lowered her hands from her face.
The mortification was gone. What remained was worse: pity. Her chest tightened painfully.
Because she knew exactly what those numbers represented. That wasn’t just money; that was family money.
Years of work. Years of sacrifices. Years of careful decisions and long nights spent building something valuable.
And now, now a significant portion of it might have vanished into the hands of a scammer because her brother had trusted a stranger on the internet more than the people who cared about him.
’Why, Von?’
The thought echoed through her mind.
’Why didn’t you talk to someone first?’
’Why didn’t you ask Lily?’
’Why didn’t you ask me?’
’Why didn’t you ask anyone?’
She looked at her brother standing there, staring at his phone as though willing reality to change.
For the first time since he had entered her office that morning, he no longer looked like the confident heir to a fortune.
He just looked like a man who had made a terrible mistake.
Sighing, Stan leaned against the wall and watched the entire collapse unfold with the calm detachment of a man who had predicted the outcome from the moment Von opened his mouth.
’Well deserved,’ he thought, without much emotion attached to it. ’Maybe next time he’ll learn to be more careful.’
Falling for a scam that obvious required a remarkable combination of arrogance and wishful thinking.
Still, Stan had no particular interest in witnessing the next stage of the disaster; the frantic calls to banks, the desperate consultations with lawyers, the inevitable conversation with Lily and any of his other siblings.
The slow, painful process of calculating exactly how much of the Reeves inheritance had just been wired into accounts controlled by people who would never be seen again.
That was a family problem, and he had a meeting to attend.
Stan glanced at his watch. Forty minutes until the shareholders’ meeting.
If he left now, he would arrive with time to spare.
"Vivian."
She looked up immediately, slipping back into her professional persona with admirable speed despite everything that had just happened.
"Yes, Sir Stan?"
"I’m heading to the shareholders’ meeting."
His gaze briefly shifted toward Von.
The man was still standing where he had frozen, staring at his phone as though the screen might suddenly reverse reality if he looked at it long enough.
"Handle the rest here," Stan continued. "And whatever your brother needs, make sure it doesn’t interfere with your work. I want the remaining contracts processed before the end of the day."
"Understood."
Stan gave a small nod, then he turned toward Xenia.
"Miss Xenia."
A brief nod of acknowledgment, professional and polite, nothing more.
As for Von, he offered no acknowledgment at all. The man was no longer part of his concern.
Without another word, Stan turned and walked out of the office. The door clicked shut behind him.
The sounds of the room disappeared instantly. Silence greeted him in the corridor.
And for a moment, he just stood there.
Then he shook his head once, a small motion; half disbelief, half resignation.
There seemed to be an endless supply of people eager to hand their fortunes to the first confident liar promising impossible returns.
Some lessons, apparently, remained timeless.
The elevator chimed and the doors slid open.
Stan stepped inside, pressed the button for the executive floor, and put the entire incident out of his mind.
The shareholders’ meeting was being held in Velaris City rather than at Star Entertainment’s global headquarters overseas.
The reasoning was simple.
All of the major shareholders had already flown into Velaris for the talent show three days earlier. Asking them to disperse across multiple countries only to reconvene days later for a meeting that could be conducted perfectly well in the same city would have been an unnecessary inconvenience for individuals who collectively controlled the better part of a five-hundred-billion-dollar entertainment empire.
More importantly, Stan had decided against it.
As the company’s largest individual shareholder and the holder of the greatest voting authority within Star Entertainment’s ownership structure, his preference carried decisive weight.
No one had objected.
The venue chosen was a private executive conference center located two blocks from the Velaris branch office.
