Chapter 11 - Victoria’s Desperate Bargain from the Holding Cell
Three days after the arrests, I received an urgent request from the federal detention center in Brooklyn. Victoria Sterling had refused to speak with her court-appointed defense attorneys unless she was granted a ten-minute meeting with me.
I arrived at the facility wearing my civilian charcoal suit. I sat down at the stainless steel table in the visitor’s room, separated by reinforced glass.
My mother was brought in wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, her wrists shackled to a belly chain. Without her makeup, her expensive blowouts, and her diamond earrings, she looked twenty years older—hollow, frail, and utterly broken.
She picked up the receiver on her side of the glass. I lifted mine.
“Sienna,” she wept, tears cutting tracks down her hollow cheeks. “You have to help me. You have to tell the prosecutors that I didn’t know what was in the tea. Richard told me it was a herbal sedative to help Arthur sleep! I didn’t know it was digitalis! I swear on your grandmother’s grave, I didn’t know!”
I listened to her desperate lies without blinking.
“Victoria,” I said calmly. “We retrieved the deleted text messages from your private phone. On the afternoon of October 14th, you texted Richard: ‘He’s writing the trust tonight. Do it today or we lose everything.’”
Victoria stopped crying. Her expression hardened into a bitter, venomous mask.
“I raised you,” she hissed into the receiver. “I gave you a life of privilege. You owe me everything you have!”
“You didn’t raise me,” I replied, my voice steady and unwavering. “Dad raised me. You spent my entire life trying to break my spirit so I would be as vain, hollow, and dependent as you. You thought weakness was something you could beat into people. But all you did was teach me how to survive enemies like you.”
“You’re going to let them send your own mother to prison for life?!” she screamed, her voice cracking through the receiver.
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“I’m not sending you to prison, Victoria,” I said, standing up and smoothing my jacket. “The law is. And unlike Dad, the law will not forgive you.”
I hung up the receiver and walked out of the room, leaving her screaming my name against the soundproof glass.
