Chapter 9 - The Confession of a Ruined Queen
Before Alexander could return to the estate, there was one final loose thread that required his personal attention.
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was a brutalist concrete monolith, gray, cold, and thoroughly indifferent to wealth or social pedigree.
Inside the windowless attorney-client visitation room, Victoria Sterling sat handcuffed to a stainless-steel table.
The change in her was staggering. Her custom Dior gown had been replaced by a coarse, ill-fitting orange jumpsuit. Her elaborate updo had collapsed into tangled, greasy strands of blonde hair. Her makeup was smeared across her pale face, her eyes swollen and red from hours of hysterical weeping.
When the heavy steel door buzzed open and Alexander walked in, Victoria looked up.
For a split second, a desperate, pathetic spark of hope flashed in her green eyes.
“Alex…” she gasped, lunging forward until the chain of her handcuffs snapped taut against the table. “Alex! Oh, God, Alex, please! Tell them it was a mistake! Tell them you dropped the charges! My lawyer said the federal prosecutor is seeking life without parole! Life, Alex! Look at me! I can’t survive in here!”
Alexander did not sit down. He stood on the opposite side of the steel table, his hands resting casually in his coat pockets. He looked at her not with hatred, but with the cold curiosity one might show an exotic bug trapped beneath a glass jar.
“Your father has already signed a proffer agreement with the Department of Justice, Victoria,” Alexander said, his voice flat and even.
Victoria froze. “What?”
“Robert rolled on you forty minutes after his arrest,” Alexander informed her, each word landing like an iron hammer. “He testified under oath that the plan to steal the ledger and the bracelet from Eleanor’s crypt was entirely your idea. He claimed you threatened to expose his embezzlement to the SEC if he didn't provide you with the medical clearance codes to access the mausoleum.”
“THAT BASTARD!” Victoria screamed, slamming her cuffed fists onto the metal table, the sound clattering violently against the concrete walls. “He lied! He’s a coward! He told me to do it! He said Eleanor had hidden a secondary will that cut him out of the trust completely!”
“It doesn't matter who started it,” Alexander said. “You finished it. You desecrated my mother’s body. You pulled an heirloom from a corpse’s wrist and wore it to an engagement party.”
Victoria began to laugh—a broken, shrill sound that spiraled into pure madness. She leaned across the table, her face contorting into a mask of pure, unbridled malice.
“You want to know why I wore it, Alexander?” she hissed, her eyes wild. “Because I hated her! I hated that sanctimonious, untouchable bitch! Even when she was dying, coughing up blood in that bed, she looked at me like I was dirt! She looked right through me! She told me, *‘You can seduce my son, Victoria, but you will never be a Vance. You are nothing more than a common thief with expensive perfume.’*”
Victoria bared her teeth, tears of venomous rage spilling down her cheeks.
“She was right! I wanted to dance on her grave! I wanted to wear her favorite diamonds while you slipped a ring on my finger! I wanted her to look up from hell and see that I won!”
Alexander stared at her. His expression didn't change by a millimeter.
“You didn't win, Victoria,” Alexander whispered. “You lost everything. Your father is going to prison. Your family’s company has been acquired by Vance Global. The Sterling name will be erased from every public institution in this country.”
He took a step back toward the heavy steel door.
“And you are going to spend the next forty years of your life waking up in a six-by-eight concrete cell, wearing orange cotton, eating off plastic trays, and remembering the night you traded your entire life for a bracelet you couldn't even keep.”
“ALEXANDER! DON'T LEAVE ME HERE!” Victoria shrieked, thrashing against the handcuffs, her knuckles bleeding as the steel bit into her wrists. “ALEXANDER! LOOK AT ME! I’M YOUR FIANCÉE! YOU LOVED ME!”
The heavy steel door buzzed.
Alexander stepped through into the corridor.
He didn't turn back. He didn't look through the small viewing window.
As the steel door slammed shut, cutting off Victoria’s screams forever, Alexander took a deep, clean breath of cold autumn air.
The past was dead.
May you like
It was time to lay his mother to rest.
***
