Chapter 4
Chapter 5: The Scars of Sovereignty
The state penitentiary was an architecture of an entirely different sort. Here, there were no fluted columns, no vaulted ceilings, no illusions of aristocratic grandeur. There was only reinforced aggregate concrete, bullet-resistant glass, and the relentless, industrial hum of fluorescent bulbs that never turned off.
Three months had passed since the catastrophe at St. Jude Cathedral.
I sat on a cold steel stool on the visitor’s side of the reinforced glass partition in the maximum-security processing wing. Beside me sat DA Diane Reynolds, holding a heavy leather briefcase containing the final disposition documents.
A heavy steel door buzzed open on the opposite side.
Two correction officers escorted Arthur Vance and Evelyn Vance to the partition.
The transformation was absolute. The vanity that had sustained them for thirty years had been stripped away like rotten veneer. Arthur was sixty pounds lighter; his skin was a sallow, gray parchment, his once-manicured hair shaved down to uneven prison stubble. He wore a stained orange jumpsuit, his hands shackled to an iron chain around his waist.
Evelyn was unrecognizable. Without her weekly chemical treatments, her hair had turned a wild, brittle white; her face, deprived of luxury serums and soft lighting, looked hollow, lined with deep, bitter fissures of permanent grievance. She sat down, her trembling, bruised hands clutching the telephone receiver as if it were a life preserver.
I picked up my receiver.
My jaw was completely healed. The titanium plates had integrated flawlessly with my reconstructed bone; the wires had been removed four weeks prior. All that remained of Arthur’s hammer strike was a faint, elegant silver line that traced along my left cheekbone—a structural scar that did not disfigure me, but lent my face an austere, formidable gravity.
“Genevieve…” Evelyn’s voice through the earpiece was a ragged, pathetic rasp. Tears cut tracks through the grime on her cheeks. “Gia, my baby… look at us. Look at what they’re doing to your father. He has angina. The guards… they don’t give him his medication. He won’t survive the winter in this facility.”
I looked at her through the glass. My pulse remained at an undisturbed, rhythmic sixty beats per minute. “You look healthy enough to speak, Mother. That’s more than I could do when you left me on the dressing room floor.”
“It was an accident!” Arthur sobbed, leaning his forehead against the scratched acrylic, his voice cracking into a desperate whine. “You know how I get when the pressure mounts, Gia! The creditors were threatening to take the house! The bank was foreclosing! I wasn’t in my right mind! I never meant to hit you that hard! Tell the judge it was a domestic misunderstanding! Tell them you forgive us!”
“A domestic misunderstanding?” DA Reynolds interjected, her voice cutting through the intercom like a scalpel. “Mr. Vance, you brought a twenty-two-ounce carpenter’s hammer from your garage into a third-floor dressing suite. You struck your daughter with ninety pounds of localized kinetic force. That is not a misunderstanding. That is premeditated attempted murder.”
Reynolds clicked open her briefcase and slid a heavy document against the glass counter.
“This is the formal Rule 11 plea agreement,” Reynolds said flatly. “Arthur Vance: twenty-four years in the state penitentiary without the possibility of parole. Evelyn Vance: eighteen years for conspiracy to commit murder and felony child endangerment. If you sign today, the State will agree not to pursue federal wire fraud charges regarding the loans you solicited using Alexander Sterling’s name.”
“Eighteen years?” Evelyn shrieked, slamming her palm against the glass. “I will die in here! Gia, you can’t do this to your own mother! Who gave you life? Who clothed you? Who introduced you to the society that allowed you to meet Alexander? You owe us!”
“I owe you nothing,” I said. My voice was level, quiet, and carried a weight that made Evelyn’s hysterical shrieking die in her throat. “For twenty-eight years, I believed that if I worked hard enough, if I sacrificed enough, if I yielded enough, you would finally look at me as a daughter instead of a load-bearing column to hold up your rotten house.”
I leaned forward, my silver scar catching the harsh fluorescent light.
“Grandmother Helena taught me that when a foundation is compromised by dry rot, you don’t paint over the plaster, Evelyn. You condemn the building. You bring in the demolition teams. And you scrape the ground down to bedrock.”
“What about Bianca?” Arthur wept, snot running down his upper lip, unheeded. “She’s your sister, Gia! She was just a child! She didn’t know what she was doing!”
“Bianca was twenty-two years old,” I replied coldly. “Her bail was denied. Her defense counsel attempted to argue diminished capacity, but the 4K footage of her sliding my ring onto her finger while I choked on my own blood destroyed any jury sympathy. She took a plea this morning: six years at the women’s correctional annex for felony larceny and accessory after the fact.”
I paused, watching the absolute horror settle into their eyes.
“She has been permanently dropped from every agency. Her social media accounts were seized by the bankruptcy trustees to pay off her boutique debts. The society she tried to steal will never speak her name again. When she walks out of prison at twenty-eight, she will have no degree, no inheritance, no trust fund, and no family.”
“You monster,” Evelyn hissed, her eyes narrowing into the familiar, venomous glare of the woman who had tried to erase me. “You cold, heartless monster.”
“No,” I said, setting the receiver down on the steel counter. “I am an architect.”
I rose from the stool, smoothing the front of my tailored wool coat. I turned my back on the glass, ignoring the frantic, muffled banging of Arthur’s fists against the acrylic, and walked through the heavy security doors into the blinding, clean autumn air.
Alexander was waiting beside the car.
The wind off the river caught his dark hair as he opened the passenger door for me. But before I could slide into the leather seat, he reached into his breast pocket and handed me a heavy, wax-sealed manila envelope.
“What is this?” I asked.
“The bankruptcy auction closed an hour ago,” Alexander said softly, his hand resting warm and solid against the small of my back. “The Vance ancestral estate, the grounds, the carriage houses, and the thirty acres of surrounding forest. Arthur’s creditors wanted cash immediately.”
I opened the envelope. Inside was the recorded deed of title, stamped by the county recorder’s office.
May you like
The property was registered exclusively in a single name: Genevieve Vance.
“The ground is cleared, Gia,” Alexander smiled, his eyes reflecting the clear blue sky above us. “What do you want to build on the ruins?”
