Chapter 47 - The Broken Scion’s Confession
Jonathan dropped the second bag. It hit the wood with a heavy metallic clink, spilling stacks of bearer bonds and foreign passports onto the wet dock. He fell to his knees, his hands trembling as he stared up at me through the rain.
"She... she was never human, Aurelia," he sobbed, all of his former arrogance thoroughly eradicated. "Your father was terrified of her. My mother was terrified of her. When we locked her in that vault, my father spent three weeks drinking himself into a coma because he knew the locks would only hold as long as the Whitaker bloodline remained fractured."
"You tried to mend the fracture by making me your puppet," I said, looking down at him with undisguised contempt.
"It was Victoria's idea!" he pleaded, crawling forward an inch before stopping at the toe of my boots. "My mother said that if I married you, if I broke your spirit, if I kept you docile and subservient for ten years, the automated protocols would classify you as incompetent and transfer the master cipher to our branch! But you were too stubborn! You never broke!"
"And Sloane?" I asked coldly. "Was flaunting your mistress in a silver gown at the Plaza part of the high-finance strategy, or just your own pathetic vanity?"
Jonathan squeezed his eyes shut, tears mixing with the freezing rain on his cheeks. "I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to see you weep just once. You were always so cold... so much like her. Every time you looked at me, I saw Lillian looking down at me from that pod, waiting to slaughter us all."
I stepped past him, kicking the open bag of bearer bonds into the dark waters of the Hudson. "Where did she take the Old Guard?"
Jonathan looked up, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. "The Newport fortress... Cliff Walk. The foundation is built directly over the Atlantic fault line. There’s a pneumatic terminal there that connects to the underwater bullion reserves. If she reaches the primary console before midnight, she’s going to purge the global ledger. All the debts, all the holdings, all the banking records of the last thirty years—she’s going to wipe it clean and reset the world to 1898."
"Get on your boat, Jonathan," I said coldly, turning my back on him.
He blinked, stunned. "You're... you're letting me go?"
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"You're not worth the bullet, nor the cell space," I replied as I reached the door of my Maybach. "Spend the rest of your life living off scraps in foreign ports, knowing that the empire you tried to steal belongs to me. And pray that my mother doesn't find you first."
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