She's looking at me the way she used to look at Dad when he outmaneuvered her in an argument. The way she looked at Matthew when he got too comfortable. The way predators look at other predators they've underestimated.
You won, her eyes say.This time.
Then she's gone, chains scraping stone, and I realize my hands are bleeding where the wood grain finally broke skin.
"Breathe." Sergei's voice, low and close. His hand finds my lower back, warm through silk. "It's done."
Is it?
I've been waiting for this moment for twelve months. Through depositions and discovery. Through media circuses and board meetings. Through nights when the ghosts of what I've done sat on my chest and whisperedmurderer, murderer, murdereruntil dawn came.
I put a bullet in my uncle's shoulder and watched him bleed on hundred-dollar bills.
I watched my mother try to bargain her way out with secrets she's been hoarding like currency.
I sat in conference rooms signing documents that transferred control of an empire built on bodies and lies.
And now she's gone—shuffling toward a prison van in ankle chains, about to trade Chanel for commissary—and I feel...
Nothing.
The ash taste in my mouth. The splinters in my palms. Sergei's hand on my back, the only warm thing in this entire building.
Nothing else.
"That's shock," he says, reading my face the way he reads threat assessments. "It'll hit later."
"What if it doesn't?"
"Then we deal with that, too."
Three trials in twelve months.Mother's was the last.
Matthew never made it to his. The shoulder wound I gave him at the gala turned septic three weeks later. He died in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the rails, with no one holding his hand. I didn't attend the funeral. Neither did anyone else, according to Wesley.
Cal Reznick's death was ruled self-defense before his body was cold—three witnesses saw him draw first. Sergei's murder charge for Elena's car bomb was dropped the week after the gala, once ballistics matched the explosive to Matthew's Chicagocontacts. Detective Fraser called personally to apologize for the arrest.
Gerald Hartman surfaced six months ago. New identity, small town in Montana, running a used bookstore. Wesley sent me a photo—grey beard now, reading glasses, looking nothing like the terrified man who bled on a diner floor. I mailed him a first edition of his favorite mystery novel. Anonymous. It felt like the least I could do.
Reporters swarm the courthouse steps like roaches toward crumbs.
"Mrs. Orlov! How do you feel about the verdict?"
"Will you visit your mother in prison?"
"Is it true Davenport Holdings posted record profits while your family's been on trial?"
I stop. Turn. Let the cameras catch whatever's written on my face—probably something feral, based on how two of them step back.
"My father is dead." My voice comes out flatter than I intend. Emptier. "My mother helped kill him. Justice was served. That's all that matters."
Sergei's arm wraps around my waist, half-guiding, half-carrying me toward the SUV where Andrei waits with the engine running. The door slams behind us, cutting off the shouting, and suddenly the world shrinks to tinted windows and leather seats and the man beside me who smells like cedar and gun oil and the only safety I've known in a year.
"You're bleeding."
I look down. Red smears across my cream silk blouse, spreading from my palms where the splinters went deep.
"Huh." The observation sounds distant. Clinical. "I didn't feel it."
