Chapter 9 - The Reckoning of Blood
The Fairfax County Adult Detention Center smells of industrial floor stripper and cold institutional soup.
It is a concrete bunker that strips away thirty-thousand-dollar wardrobes, Swiss skin-care regimens, and family lineage within twenty minutes of booking.
I sat on the visitor’s side of the reinforced glass partition, wearing a simple navy cashmere coat and no jewelry except the platinum engagement band Ethan had placed back on my finger the morning after the gala.
The heavy steel door on the opposite side buzzed open.
Alysia shuffled into the cubicle.
She was wearing a standard-issue orange jumpsuit that was three sizes too large for her narrow frame. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ragged, greasy ponytail; her skin, devoid of five hundred dollars of daily serums, looked dull, gray, and prematurely lined around the mouth.
Her hands were cuffed to a chain around her waist.
She sat down on the metal stool, the chains clinking against the stainless steel bench. She picked up the plastic telephone receiver with both hands, her fingers raw and bitten down to the quick.
I lifted my receiver.
“You look terrible, Alysia,” I said.
Her lips trembled, a grotesque parody of her old, condescending smile trying to form on her face before collapsing into a bitter sneer.
“Did you come here to gloat, Ari? Did Ethan drive you in the Maybach? Did you bring your little silver stick so you could tap on the glass and show me how well you’re walking?”
“I came to give you this,” I said, pressing a legal document against the thick polycarbonate glass.
It was a certified copy of the bankruptcy court order issued forty-eight hours earlier.
“The Westfield Properties liquidation was approved yesterday morning,” I told her, my voice calm, level, stripped of any anger. “The house in McLean was seized by the federal marshals at dawn. The BMW is being auctioned on Friday. The trust accounts in Zurich were frozen under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.”
Alysia’s eyes darted across the text through the glass, her breath fogging the plastic.
“Where is Dad?” she whispered.
“Harper took a plea deal this morning,” I said. “Eleven years at the federal correctional institution in Petersburg. He agreed to testify against Victoria in the capital murder solicitation trial in exchange for avoiding a life sentence without parole.”
“And Mom?”
“Victoria is in the psychiatric wing at Central State,” I replied. “She spent forty-five minutes yesterday trying to convince the court-appointed evaluation panel that she is the rightful Duchess of Marlborough. The doctors don't believe she’s insane, Alysia. They just think she’s a sociopath who has run out of mirrors.”
Alysia let out a dry, rattling sob that shook the chains at her waist.
“You destroyed us,” she hissed, pressing her face against the glass until her forehead left an oily smudge. “You tore the whole family down! We were the Westfields! We built this state!”
“You built nothing,” I said, leaning forward until my eyes were six inches from hers. “Grandfather built three shopping centers on borrowed money, and you and Victoria spent forty years pretending you were European royalty. You lived on credit, you lived on cruelty, and when the bill came due, you tried to pay it with twenty-four feet of my blood.”
“I didn't mean for you to fall,” she lied, the words coming out automatically, the final, pathetic remnants of a lifetime of performance. “I reached for you, Ari... I tried to catch you...”
I stared at her until the lie died in her throat.
The silence between us stretched for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty, until the hum of the prison ventilation system was the only sound left in the world.
“You smiled,” I whispered.
Alysia’s eyes widened slightly.
“I saw you,” I said, my voice dropping into that deep, quiet space where nothing could ever hurt me again. “Before the canvas ripped. Before the limestone basin broke my hip. I looked up, Alysia. I saw your hands. I saw your mouth. You smiled because you thought you were finally going to be the only one.”
Alysia’s jaw tightened. The last vestige of the victim vanished, replaced by that pure, black, bottomless envy that had poisoned her since we were children sharing a nursery.
“You always had it,” she spat into the phone, her voice venomous. “The talent. The brains. Everyone who actually mattered looked at your little sketches and saw something real. I had to perform every second of my life just to keep people from noticing that there was nothing inside me! And then Ethan looked right through me—right through me!—at that gala, and he asked about *your* library. *Your* restoration.”
She slammed her cuffed hands against the steel bench.
“You were supposed to be the maid, Ariana! You were supposed to stay in the back!”
“The maid survived,” I said.
I hung up the receiver.
I did not wait for the guard to buzz the door. I stood, leaning my weight onto my cane, feeling the solid, mechanical strength of my titanium pins holding my frame upright.
Behind the glass, Alysia was screaming, beating her cuffed fists against the polycarbonate, her mouth forming words that no longer carried through the wire, her face distorted into an ugly, solitary mask that would spend the next twenty-two years staring at concrete walls.
I walked down the long, green-painted corridor toward the exit.
With every step, the sound of the chains grew fainter.
May you like
With every step, the weight of the Westfield name peeled away from my skin like dead, sun-bleached paint from an old facade, until there was nothing left of them on me at all.
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