Chapter 7
Down the hall in Holding Cell Three, Julian Vance was discovering that a five-thousand-suit does not protect a man from the crushing reality of concrete walls and steel toilets. Gone was the arrogant corporate titan who had stood over his kneeling wife with a raised leather belt; in his place sat a sweating, disheveled man in a wrinkled dark grey shirt, his manicured fingers twitching nervously against his knees as he stared at the concrete floor.
Across the metal interrogation table sat Officer Miller and a federal prosecutor named Sarah Chen, a woman whose sharp bob and piercing intellect brooked zero nonsense. Chen had spent the last twenty minutes laying out an unassailable dossier of federal wire fraud, tax evasion, domestic assault, and conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
“Your mother has already started pointing fingers, Mr. Vance,” Chen said smoothly, sliding a signed deposition across the table. “She claims you orchestrated the entire financial scheme and forced her to participate under threat of cutting off her monthly allowance. She’s quite eager to trade your freedom for her own comfortable house arrest.”
Julian’s head snapped up, his face contorted in sudden, betrayed fury. “She lied! The whole thing was her idea! She taught me how to break people down! She picked Elena out specifically because she had no living parents to ask questions!”
Miller didn’t flinch, merely watching him with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing a particularly pathetic specimen under a microscope. “So you admit to the psychological abuse, the forced medication, and the physical assaults documented in your wife’s medical journal?”
Julian’s mouth snapped shut as the trap snapped shut around his own tongue. He stared at the deposition, realizing with sudden, nauseating horror that his own mother had thrown him under the bus the very second the legal pressure exceeded her threshold of self-preservation. The Vance family loyalty—a myth they had used to subjugate Elena—was nothing more than a mutual suicide pact built on selfishness and fear.
“I want a lawyer,” Julian choked out, his voice cracking with panic.
May you like
“You’ve had the right to one since we read you your Miranda rights thirty-five minutes ago,” Chen replied, closing her leather portfolio with a definitive snap. “Your public defender will be assigned in the morning. Until then, enjoy the quiet.”
As Miller and Chen stood up and walked toward the heavy steel door, Julian slammed his cuffed hands against the metal table, screaming obscenities into the empty room. But his voice echoed off the cinder blocks with no audience left to intimidate, no terrified wife to shrink away from his fury, and no mother to applaud his cruelty.
