My mother locked me in a room with five high-powered lawyers and expected me to sign away everything my father had left me. What she didn’t know was that I wasn’t the ordinary government employee my family had always dismissed me as. I was Colonel Sienna Sterling, commander of a specialized military intelligence unit, and while she thought she was cornering a grieving daughter, I was quietly counting the five attorneys around the table and waiting for them to discover that I had prepared an ambush of my own. –

“Yes.”

My mother stood so quickly her chair scraped backward.

“This is irrelevant.”

“Sit down, Victoria,” Martin said.

The entire room froze.

Nobody spoke to my mother like that.

Especially not people she was paying.

Her face went white.

“What did you say?”

“I said sit down.”

She stared at him.

Martin reached into his briefcase.

Richard moved away from the window.

Julian finally put down his phone.

The other four attorneys exchanged uneasy looks.

And I understood.

They were not a team.

At least not all of them.

Martin placed a sealed envelope on the table.

My name was written across the front.

SIENNA.

My father’s handwriting.

For the first time that evening, something hit me harder than anger.

Grief.

His handwriting was slightly crooked toward the end of his life.

I recognized the heavy downward stroke on the S.

I reached for the envelope.

My mother grabbed it first.

“No.”

Martin stood.

“Mrs. Sterling.”