Chapter 7 - Evelyn and Robert's Desperate Begging
"Vesper, darling..." Evelyn wept, her voice dropping into the sweet, coaxing tone she usually reserved for coaxing donations out of wealthy dowagers. "Please. Look at me. Look at your mother."
She reached out, trying to touch the sleeve of my coat, but a tactical guard stepped between us, his broad arm forming an impassable barrier.
"Vesper, this has gone too far," Evelyn begged, her hands fluttering in the air like wounded birds. "We are your family! We gave you life! Yes, Saturday was a misunderstanding. Things got heated! People made mistakes! But Cresa is your sister! Draven is your nephew! You can't let these men put your sister in prison! You can't throw your own parents out into the street like common vagrants!"
Robert stumbled down the steps behind her, his knees shaking so badly he had to catch himself on the wrought-iron railing.
The proud patriarch, the man who had spent thirty years reminding me that I was a genetic disappointment who lacked the beauty and drive of my older sister, looked like an old, broken beggar.
"Vesper," Robert choked out, his voice hoarse with genuine terror. "Call them off. Please. You have the power. You own the house? Fine! It's yours! We’ll pay you rent! We’ll sign whatever papers you want! Just tell these soldiers to leave! If this gets into the local papers, I’m ruined. The bank, the board, the club... I’ll have nothing left!"
I stood in front of them, Thorne’s hand resting securely on the small of my back.
I looked at Evelyn. I looked at the diamond earrings in her lobes, the perfect silver styling of her hair, the woman who had watched me bleed onto her patio stones and casually taken another sip of wine because my pain was an inconvenience to her social standing.
I looked at Robert. The man who had stepped around my fractured skull to protect his imported travertine from being stained, telling me to drag my garbage away.
I reached up with one trembling hand and carefully lifted the edge of the surgical gauze covering my left cheek.
The raw, jagged bruising was exposed to the sunlight—a grotesque mosaic of crushed tissue, surgical stitches, and the mechanical steel pins holding my zygomatic arch in place. My mouth could only open a fraction of an inch, the wires humming with tension against my teeth.
When I spoke, my voice was low, muffled, and metallic, but every single person on that lawn heard every syllable.
"When I was twelve," I said slowly through clenched teeth, "Cresa threw my grandfather's journals into the incinerator because he left them to me instead of her. You told me I was selfish for crying."
Evelyn flinched as if struck.
"When I was nineteen," I continued, each word costing an ache of dull fire in my skull, "you stole my tuition savings to pay for Cresa's debutante ball in Atlanta. You told me higher education was wasted on a girl who had no social grace."
Robert swallowed hard, looking down at his slippers.
"And three days ago," I whispered, pointing to the stone patio behind them, "I laid on that ground with my skull broken in three places. I couldn't breathe. I was choking on my own blood. I looked at you, Mother. I looked at you, Father. And you didn't see a daughter. You didn't even see a human being. You saw garbage."
A single tear slipped from my uninjured eye, tracing a path down the clean side of my face.
"You told me never to come back to your house," I said, letting the surgical gauze fall back into place. "So I won't. But this isn't your house. It never was. And today, the garbage is finally being taken to the curb."
I turned my back on them.
"Vesper, no! Vesper!" Evelyn shrieked, lunging forward, but the state troopers caught her by the arms, holding her back as she began to kick and scream like a spoiled child denied a toy. "You ungrateful little monster! We clothed you! We fed you! You owe us!"
Behind me, Major Kalin nodded to the civilian moving crew.
Ten men wearing work gloves walked through the grand double doors of the estate, carrying flat dollies, heavy rolls of packing tape, and industrial cardboard boxes.
May you like
The systematic dismantling of Robert and Evelyn Sterling’s manufactured paradise had officially begun.
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