Chapter 18 - The True Client
My fingers grew cold against the screen of the tablet. "What are you talking about, David? The account was funded through St. Jude Sovereign Trust."
"The funding came from St. Jude, yes," David said, his voice tightening. "Arthur provided the logistics and the chemical synthesis. But the initiating authorization... the person who paid the four-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit and provided your seating chart, your dietary requirements, and the exact floorplan of the bridal suite where the glass was prepped..."
David sent the decrypted purchase order directly to my screen.
The client's name was printed in clear, unencrypted text.
*Eleanor Vance.*
My mother.
The air rushed out of my lungs as though I had been struck in the chest with an iron bar. My vision blurred momentarily around the edges, the sterile marble rotunda of the Zurich bank warping into a nightmare of fractured light.
Eleanor Vance. The woman who had wept on national television after Vanessa’s arrest, sobbing that her family had been torn apart by tragedy. The woman who had sat at the back of the courtroom during Vanessa’s sentencing, wearing a black veil, pretending to be utterly broken by the cruelty of the legal system. The woman who had visited me in the burn ward, gently stroking my uninjured hand, whispering that she would pray every day for my recovery.
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"Clara?" Marcus’s voice reached through the roaring silence in my ears. He was looking at my tablet, his face suddenly turning the color of wet chalk. "No... no, that’s impossible. Mom wouldn't... she couldn't..."
"She didn't just authorize it," I whispered, my voice sounding distant, mechanical, as if spoken by someone else entirely. "She financed the deposit using the principal from my late father’s estate. She used my father’s life insurance payout—the money that was supposed to be held in trust for my firm's seed capital—to hire Arthur Sterling to disfigure me."
