Chapter 90 - The Ghost of Thanksgiving
I breached the rotunda doors with a single kick, my weapon leveled directly at the back of Julian's bandaged neck.
"Step away from the console, Julian," I said, my voice cutting through the hum of the cooling units like a straight razor.
The typing stopped.
Julian didn't turn around immediately. He let out a low, wet rasp of a laugh that ended in a sickening, rattling cough. Slowly, mechanically, he used his functioning left hand to swivel the wheelchair around to face me.
The sight of him was grotesque. The thermobaric fire had peeled away his silver-fox elegance, leaving behind raw, grafted skin and an eye that was milk-white and blind. But the other eye—the dark, calculating eye of the Archon—burned with undiluted venom.
"Emily," he rasped, his voice sounding like two dry stones grinding together. "I must congratulate you. Escaping a subterranean collapse, finding Vance's floating scrap heap, and swimming into an underwater tomb... Sarah would have been so terribly proud of her little lab experiment."
"Step away from the console, or I put a bullet through your good eye," I said, stepping into the center of the room, keeping my line of sight clear.
"You won't shoot me," Julian whispered, tilting his head toward the cylindrical tank behind him. "Because if you shoot me, you'll never see what I have queued up on the secondary display."
He tapped a key with a trembling, scarred finger.
A massive wall-mounted projector flickered to life. It didn't display financial ledgers or military telemetry.
It was a home video recording, dated November 26, 2015.
Three days before the Thanksgiving dinner that had destroyed my life.
On the screen was the drawing room of the Connecticut estate. My father sat on the Chesterfield sofa, clutching a tumbler of Scotch, his face bloated and red with terror. My mother, Eleanor, stood by the mantelpiece, smoking a thin cigarette, her hands shaking.
And standing in the center of the room, looking immaculate in his three-piece Savile Row suit, was Julian.
*"You don't understand, Julian!"* my father’s voice blared through the rotunda speakers, cracking with desperation. *"She won't sign the guarantor papers! The girl has an independent trust coming from her grandmother's side! She won't let me use it to cover the margin calls!"*
Julian’s recorded voice was cold, measured, terrifying in its absolute lack of human empathy: *"Then you break her, Richard."*
Eleanor spoke up on the video, her voice hollow, devoid of warmth: *"And if she refuses even after that? If she walks away?"*
*"She won't walk away if you ensure the shame belongs entirely to her,"* Julian had instructed them, leaning down to tap my father’s trembling chest with the tip of his gold-headed cane. *"At dinner. In front of her brother. In front of anyone who might offer her shelter. Strike her down, Richard. Make it brutal. Make it humiliating. And Eleanor... when she looks to you for mercy, you give her the final seal."*
*"What seal?"* Eleanor had asked, her eyes dull like dead slate.
*"Tell her she brought it on herself,"* Julian said on the recording, a cold smirk touching his lips. *"A broken child who believes she is responsible for her own abuse will spend the rest of her life trying to earn back the love of her tormentors. She will sign whatever you put in front of her by Christmas."*
The recording froze on Julian's smirking face.
The silence that followed was suffocating. Every fiber of my being went completely, terrifyingly still.
It hadn't been an argument. It hadn't been a sudden explosion of my father's drunken rage.
It had been a rehearsal.
A calculated, engineered psychological assassination designed to turn me into an obedient financial slave for the rest of my life.
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"You see, Emily?" Julian whispered, his burned face twisting into a hideous, triumphant grin. "You were never a daughter. You were an investment portfolio with legs. And your precious mother... she sold you for the price of keeping her country club membership."
***
