Chương 14 - The Broken Canary
Before leaving Chicago, there was one piece of unfinished business I had to settle.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago is a brutalist concrete triangle that juts out of the loop like a prison ship stranded on dry land. Its windows are five-inch-wide slits, designed to prevent inmates from ever catching a full glimpse of the outside world.
Because of the high-profile nature of the charges—corporate espionage, attempted murder, kidnapping—Vanessa was being held in administrative segregation.
I sat in an interrogation booth on the fourth floor, separated from the opposite chair by a partition of thick, scratched Plexiglas. When the steel door buzzed open, two correctional officers escorted Vanessa inside.
The contrast from the woman I had shared a bed with for eighteen months was jarring.
Her immaculate blonde hair was pulled back into a severe, tangled ponytail. Her silk dresses and platinum jewelry were replaced by a rough, oversized navy blue smock. But it was her face that stopped me. The icy, aristocratic arrogance was gone. Her eyes were rimmed in red, hollowed out by fear and sleeplessness.
When she saw me sitting there, she flinched.
"David," she whispered through the perforated metal grill.
I didn't speak. I sat with my hands folded on the cold laminate table, watching her.
She sat down slowly, the chains around her wrists clinking against the steel frame of the chair. "Are you here to gloat? To tell me how clever you were? How thoroughly you crushed Julian?"
"Julian didn't matter," I said flatly. "And neither did you."
Vanessa let out a ragged, trembling laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete. "You think you won, don't you? You think because I’m in this orange room and you’re wearing a bespoke suit that you’re safe."
"I know about Arthur Vance," I said.
The laugh died instantly in her throat. The color drained from her face so completely that the purple bruises beneath her eyes looked like fresh wounds.
"How..." She swallowed hard, her voice cracking. "How do you know that name?"
"He called me, Vanessa. He told me everything. He told me that Julian was an expendable pawn, sent to distract me while Vance moved into position. He told me you were just an actress hired to play the role of a loving fiancée so you could search my house for a key you never understood."
Vanessa began to shake. Her hands gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles whitening beneath the skin.
"You don't understand what he is, David," she stammered, leaning in so close her breath fogged the acrylic divider. "Julian thought he was running the operation. He thought we were going to take your money, take the blueprints, and disappear to Monaco. But three days before you came home early—three days before I had Elena tied to that pillar—a courier came to my hotel room."
"What did he bring you?"
"A box," she whispered, tears finally breaking past her lashes and cutting clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks. "Inside was my mother’s wedding ring. The one she was buried with ten years ago in Vienna. Vance had dug up her grave just to show me he could reach anyone, anywhere, dead or alive."
She sobbed once, a choked, ugly sound.
"He told me that if I didn't find the key in forty-eight hours, he would have Julian skinned alive in front of me. I was terrified, David! I wasn't trying to be cruel to Elena—I was panicking! The lighter, the fire—I had to find it! I had to!"
"You almost burned her alive," I said, my voice showing zero pity. "You slept in my bed for a year and a half, pretending to love me, while planning to ruin everything my family built."
"Because I wanted to survive!" she screamed, slamming her cuffed hands against the Plexiglas. The guards behind her immediately moved forward, their batons coming up. Vanessa shrank back, cowering against her chair.
"He's going to kill you, David," she wept, her voice dropping to a frantic, broken plea. "He isn't going to share anything with you. There is no vault division. The moment you open that door for him, he will put a bullet in the back of your head and leave you in that mine forever."
I stood up, buttoning my coat.
"I know," I said quietly.
"David, please!" she begged, pressing her forehead against the glass. "They’re going to poison me in here! I know too much! He has guards on his payroll—I saw one of them wearing the compass pin this morning! Get me out of here! Put me in federal witness protection! David!"
I looked down at her—at the woman I once thought I would spend the rest of my life with, now reduced to a shattered husk of terror.
"You chose your architect, Vanessa," I said. "Now you have to live in the house he built for you."
May you like
I turned my back and walked out of the room, her screams echoing behind me until the heavy hydraulic doors slammed shut, sealing her back into the dark.
***
