Her Severance A Billionaire's Revenge

Just before college graduation, I asked my girlfriend a half-joking question.

“What if my family went bankrupt? Owed a million dollars? Would you still marry me?”

The light in her eyes flickered out. She made a flimsy excuse and left. The next day, she called me to a café to end things.

“I asked around,” she said, her voice hard. “People are calling about your debts. You’re drowning, and you want to pull me under with you? In your dreams.”

“We’re done. And I want half a million dollars. That’s my price.”

Her best friend, sitting beside her, added a sympathetic hiss. “Don’t blame her, Ethan. If you really loved her, you wouldn’t want her to suffer, would you?”

I looked at the scene they’d so carefully staged, and I almost laughed. Who told them it was my family in debt?

It was her father’s loan shark. And his calls were coming to my house.

1

In a sterile downtown coffee shop, Isabelle had shed every last bit of the woman I thought I knew. Her voice, usually soft and melodic, was a raw, ugly thing.

“Ethan! Are you deaf?” she shrieked, her voice turning heads at nearby tables. “Five hundred thousand dollars! Not a penny less! That’s what you owe me for the years I wasted on you! You will pay it!”

I just stared at her, silent.

Four years. I thought what we had was unbreakable. Turns out, it couldn’t even withstand the phantom menace of money. Our entire relationship, evaporated by a single, hypothetical question.

Before I could even form a response, she leaned in, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “Don’t even think about walking out of here until I get what I’m owed.”

Just then, my phone vibrated violently on the table. The caller ID flashed: Sharon Vickers.

Isabelle’s mother.

I hit the speakerphone button.

The voice that came through was even more shrill than her daughter’s, stripped of the sugary sweetness she usually reserved for me. “Ethan! Izzy told you, right?”

“Let me be clear. Our Isabelle’s time is not free! You’re not just walking away after all these years!”

“I know you have that condo in your name. Sell it. Get the money and give our Izzy her severance package!”

The sheer, unadulterated entitlement of it all left me speechless. A hot surge of anger shot up my spine.

To keep them from worrying, the only people who knew about the success of my startup were my parents and my best friend, Mark. To the world, and to Isabelle, I was just a regular guy with a decent nine-to-five.

That condo—the one she was demanding I liquidate—I’d bought it with my own money. Paid in full. It was meant to be our first home together after we got married.

Now, it was just an asset to be stripped.

And the supposed million-dollar debt? A complete fabrication.

A few days ago, a text message had come to my work phone. It was a collections notice, filled with graphic threats of broken limbs. The debtor wasn't me. It was Richard Vickers. Isabelle’s father.

He had forged my company’s corporate seal and used it to get a massive loan from a shark.

One million dollars, principal. With the vig, God only knew what it was now.

Isabelle and her mother had clearly gotten wind of the debt collectors and jumped to the conclusion that my business had failed, that I was the one facing financial ruin. My little joke had simply been a test to see how they’d react.

The results were… clarifying.

“Our Izzy’s youth is priceless! You have to pay!” Sharon’s voice grated through the phone’s speaker.

I forced down the fury churning in my gut, carefully lacing my voice with exhaustion and defeat. “You’re right, Sharon. I understand.”

“It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry for what I’ve put Izzy through.”

“I’ll go home and get the money together right now. We can meet and settle this in person, okay?”

Hearing me fold, Sharon’s tone instantly softened. “Well, it’s about time. At least you have some decency left.”

“Be at our house. Seven o’clock. Bring the money and the settlement papers.”

The call ended. I looked up at Isabelle. A triumphant smirk played on her lips, but her eyes were filled with nothing but contempt.

“Glad you finally see things clearly,” she said.

I nodded slowly and walked out of the coffee shop. The moment the door closed behind me, I dialed Mark.

“Mark, I need a favor.”

“I need everything you can find on a loan Richard Vickers took out using my company’s name. I need ironclad proof he signed the papers.”

“And one more thing. I need you to put together a little gift package for me. I’m going to see my future in-laws tonight.”

Mark’s voice was calm and steady on the other end. “Consider it done.”

I hung up. I couldn’t wait to see just how far they were willing to take this performance.

2

At seven o’clock sharp, I was standing on the Vickers’ doorstep.

The door was opened by Isabelle’s best friend, Jenna. Her eyes scanned me from head to toe, her disdain practically dripping from her eyelashes.

“Oh, you actually showed up. You got the money?”

I ignored her and walked straight into the living room.

The Vickers clan was assembled on the couch like a royal tribunal. On the coffee table in front of them was a sea of new luxury handbags and jewelry boxes, the price tags still attached. It seemed they’d already started spending my "severance."

Sharon’s face fell when she saw my empty hands. “Ethan. Where is the money?”

She slid a document across the table. The title was printed in an obnoxious, bold font: SEPARATION AND COMPENSATION AGREEMENT.

In cold, hard print, it stipulated that I was to pay Isabelle a one-time lump sum of five hundred thousand dollars for “emotional distress and wasted time.”

Rick, Isabelle’s father, sat beside her, sighing dramatically, his brow furrowed with fake concern. “Ethan, son, I hate to say it, but how did you let your business get this bad? Izzy’s really had a rough time, sticking by you.”

Isabelle’s eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying for hours. “Ethan, darling, I didn’t want it to come to this,” she whispered, her voice catching. “But I can’t chain my future to a failure. My parents worked so hard to give me everything. I can’t let them suffer because of your mistakes.”

She delivered the lines with such conviction, she almost seemed to believe she was the victim.

Jenna chimed in from the side, her voice dripping with venom. “Izzy is just too nice. If it were me, I’d be asking for a lot more than five hundred thousand.”

“I mean, a grown man who can’t even support himself, dragging a woman down with him? Pathetic. You should be grateful she’s letting you off this easy.”

My gaze drifted from their faces to Rick’s wrist. He was wearing a limited-edition Patek Philippe. I recognized it. I’d seen the same model at an auction last month. It went for just under a million dollars.

So that’s where the loan money went.

Seeing me hesitate, Sharon grew impatient. She tapped a manicured finger on the agreement. “Sign it! Sign it, and go get the money!”

“Oh, and that BMW of yours. You’ll sign the title over to Izzy. Think of it as a little bonus.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t have it. The car is still in your name, isn’t it?”

Unbelievable. This wasn't a breakup settlement. This was a shakedown. They wanted to bleed me dry.

I kept my mask on, letting my face crumple into a mask of anguish and despair.

“Sharon… Izzy…” I stammered. “The company… it’s gone. It’s all gone. I don’t have fifty thousand, let alone five hundred thousand.”

“I have nothing left. Not a single penny.”

As the words left my mouth, I saw it. A flicker of pure, animal panic in Rick’s eyes.

He was scared. He was terrified that if I couldn’t pay, the fire he started would finally burn its way back to him.

Oh, this was getting good.

I couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they finally learned the truth. It was going to be spectacular.

3

“No money?”

Sharon’s lips curled into a vicious sneer. “You have no money? What about your parents?”

“I remember Izzy telling me they have that old house in the city. It’s got to be worth two, maybe three million by now!”

“You’re their only son. The house is going to be yours eventually anyway. What’s the big deal about selling it now to fix your mess?”

I stared at her, my mind reeling. Did she really just suggest that I go to my parents and demand they sell the home they’d spent their entire lives paying for—their nest egg, their only security—just to fund her daughter’s shopping sprees?

Was she even human?

I looked at Isabelle, desperately searching for a sign of protest, a flicker of shame.

There was none.

She nodded, her expression earnest. “Ethan, Mom’s right,” she said softly. “I’m sure your parents want me to be happy and secure, right? Just… for my sake. Go talk to them. I know they’ll understand.”

In that moment, whatever was left of my affection for her finally, irrevocably, died.

My parents were my line in the sand. No one crossed it.

When my mother was in the hospital last year, I’d begged Isabelle to come with me, just for an hour. She’d claimed she already had plans to go shopping with Jenna. She never came. Not once.

And now she was sitting here, looking me in the eye while casually plotting to liquidate my parents’ retirement.

My voice was ice. “My mother was in the hospital after her surgery. You never visited. Not once. Do you remember that?”

The color drained from Isabelle’s face. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Rick, sensing the shift in the room, quickly jumped in to play peacemaker. “Hey, hey, let’s not bring up old stuff. We’re all family here. What’s important is solving the problem at hand. We need to figure out how to pay off this debt.”

I just laughed, a cold, empty sound.

Sharon, thinking my silence was a sign of capitulation, decided to lay all her cards on the table.

“Alright, Ethan, let me spell it out for you,” she said, her voice dropping conspiratorially. “You give us the half-million today. Your company is bankrupt, right? Perfect. You give us the cash, and then you can declare personal bankruptcy.”

“That way, all your other debts get wiped out, and our Isabelle has a nice little nest egg to start her new life! It’s the perfect plan!”

My entire worldview tilted on its axis.

They wanted to use my parents’ life savings to secure their daughter’s future, while simultaneously having me declare bankruptcy to make her father’s loan shark debt disappear.

I looked at the three of them, at their greedy, expectant faces, and I couldn't find a word in the English language to describe the profound ugliness I was witnessing.

4

I stared at the three of them, a wave of nausea washing over me.

Slowly, I leaned back against the sofa cushions. The desperate, defeated look on my face began to melt away, replaced by a cold, thin smile.

“And what if I don’t?”

The atmosphere in the room froze.

Jenna was the first to snap. She leaped to her feet, pointing a finger at my face. “Don’t you dare try to back out of this, Ethan! You think you can just walk away?”

“I’m warning you, if you don’t pay up, we will send a full account of how you ran your company into the ground and abandoned your pregnant girlfriend to every single person in your industry! We’ll post it everywhere! You’ll be ruined! No one will ever hire you again!”

Sharon held up her phone, the screen glowing with a pre-written social media post. The headline read: Heartbreak and Betrayal: My Four Years with a Deadbeat Loser Who Left My Daughter with Nothing!

The post itself was a masterpiece of fiction, painting me as a manipulative, social-climbing monster who had used her daughter and then tossed her aside.

Their plan was to destroy me with public opinion.

Isabelle, seeing me "cornered," finally dropped her victim act. She turned to Jenna, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

“The moment the money comes through, I’m going to the dealership and buying that MINI I wanted!”

Jenna rushed to her side, and the two of them began plotting.

“Totally! And then a month in Europe to de-stress.”

“Yes! I’m going to buy so many bags in Paris, and that necklace we saw…”

“Izzy, your new life is finally beginning!”

They chattered on, divvying up my money as if I wasn’t even in the room. The sight of it was physically sickening.

Sharon, seeing that I hadn’t moved, shot me a venomous look. She lunged forward and snatched my phone from my hand. She scrolled through my contacts, quickly finding my dad’s number.

“Stop wasting time! Call them now!” she barked, shoving the phone back into my face.

“Tell your parents you got some girl pregnant and you need money for an abortion! They’ll have to pay!”

I froze. “Sharon, that’s… that’s not right.”

“What choice do you have?” she snapped. “Your parents adore you. They’ll do anything to avoid a scandal. Tell them the girl wants a huge settlement. They’ll believe it.”

Isabelle nodded eagerly. “She’s right, Ethan. Your parents love you so much. They’ll do anything to protect your reputation.”

I looked from mother to daughter, a new level of fury building inside me. What were these creatures made of?

“Make the call!” Sharon urged. “Tell them you need half a million, wired immediately!”

Jenna chimed in, “Yeah, it’s going to be your money eventually anyway. What’s the big deal?”

Just then, a frantic ringing cut through the tension. It was Rick’s phone.

He fumbled it out of his pocket. When he saw the name on the screen—RHINO—his face went as white as a sheet. He shot a panicked look at us, scrambled to his feet, and stumbled out onto the balcony.

“Hello… Rhino…” his voice trembled. “The money… I’m working on it… Just give me a couple more days…”

I knew it was time. I stood up slowly and straightened my jacket.

Sharon and Isabelle were still glaring at me, their eyes filled with menace.

I just smiled at them.

“You want your money so badly? Fine.”

I took out my own phone, ignoring their confused looks, and pulled up a video file. Then, I turned the screen toward them.

“But first, let’s watch a little movie.”

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