Chapter 48 - The Flesh and the Ledger
Richard slowly tilted his head back, his sunken, venomous eyes locking onto me high above on the iron gantry.
*"Look at her, Eleanor!"* the mechanical synthesizer barked, echoing off the stone walls. *"Look at your daughter! Standing above us like a queen while her brother sits in his own filth!"*
Castiglione brought Eleanor forward to the railing, his gun firmly planted between her shoulder blades. Eleanor looked down at her son, then at her husband, clutching her chest as if her heart might burst through her ribs.
"Richard, please!" Eleanor wept, her voice reverberating pathetic and hollow. "Stop this! Take the money and let us go! We can rebuild! We can go to South America!"
*"Rebuild?"* Richard spat, a wet, rattling cough escaping his wired teeth. *"With what? She took everything! The brownstone, the hedge funds, the Sterling accounts, the cars, the reputation! The partners at my firm laughed in my face when the marshals seized the corner office! Do you know what they called me? A bankrupt fraud living off his daughter’s secret labor!"*
He pointed his cane at Marcus.
*"And this one—this pathetic excuse for an heir! He couldn't even bypass a sixty-year-old biometric lock! I gave him forty years of luxury, Ivy League tuition, private clubs, and when I needed a drop of Sterling blood to unlock the family fortune, the machine rejected him as a false claimant!"*
Marcus sobbed loudly, his chest heaving against the dynamite strapped to his ribs. "Dad... please... I tried... the scanner didn't take my hand..."
"It didn't take his hand, Richard," I said, walking slowly down the iron industrial staircase toward the floor of the cavern, my pistol lowered at my side, "because Marcus isn't Sarah Sterling’s grandson."
The silence that followed was suffocating. Even the hum of the halogen generators seemed to fade into nothingness.
Eleanor froze. Her breath caught, her fingers digging desperately into her coat.
Richard slowly turned his scarred face toward Eleanor on the catwalk. *"What did she say?"*
"Check the birth registries in Zurich, Richard," I said, reaching the bottom step of the staircase, standing thirty feet from him on the hard salt floor. "Sarah Sterling had only one biological child: my mother. But Marcus wasn't born in Zurich. Marcus was adopted quietly from a private clinic in Vienna to replace the stillborn boy Eleanor delivered in the winter of 1991—because grandfather’s trust required a male heir to disburse the first twenty million."
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Eleanor collapsed to her knees on the gantry above, unable to meet her husband's gaze.
"You spent your whole life beating me and worshipping him," I said, taking one step forward into the light. "And the whole time, the only drop of Sterling blood in this entire room was running through the veins of the daughter you broke across a dining table."
