Chapter 13 - The Reckoning of Elena Vance
Elena was brought back to an isolated holding cell beneath our private security facility in North Atlanta.
She sat on a bare metal bench, shivering in the cold, stripped of her designer clothes and luxury jewelry. When the heavy steel door opened and I walked in, she threw herself onto the floor at my feet.
“Vincent! I’m sorry! I swear I’ll leave the country! I’ll disappear forever, you’ll never see me again!” she begged, clutching at the cuffs of my trousers.
I looked down at her with neither anger nor pity—only absolute, icy detachment.
“You won't be leaving the country, Elena,” I said quietly. “And you won't be dying tonight either. Death is far too easy an escape for what you did to Lila.”
She looked up, her eyes filled with frantic confusion. “What... what are you going to do to me?”
“Dr. Harold Sterling has already been arrested by federal authorities for trafficking illegal biological neurotoxins,” I informed her. “He gave up your full confession, your financial records, and the bank transfers linking you to the poisoning of my first wife, Clara.”
Elena gasped, the final layer of her deceit completely stripped away.
“You will spend the rest of your natural life in a maximum-security federal correctional facility in solitary confinement,” I continued. “Every single asset you have ever touched has been seized. You will rot in a six-by-eight concrete box with no light, no money, and no name. You will live in the exact darkness you tried to force upon my daughter.”
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“No! Vincent, please! Just shoot me! Kill me!” she screamed, clawing at the concrete floor as two federal marshals stepped into the room and locked heavy iron chains around her wrists and ankles.
I turned my back on her screams and walked out into the cool Atlanta night air, leaving the ghost of my past behind forever.
