Chapter 6
The wail of the ambulance siren cut through the damp morning air as the vehicle tore away from the hotel curb, its red and blue lights painting the wet pavement in flashing streaks. Inside the cramped back of the mobile unit, Clara lay strapped to a rigid spine board, an oxygen mask hissing rhythmically over her face. Her light satin robe had been cut away by the paramedics, revealing purple bruising across her ribs and the jagged cut along her cheekbone where Julian had struck her during their desperate argument before the police arrived. A paramedic worked efficiently, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around her arm while monitoring her pulse on a digital screen. Clara stared blankly at the ceiling of the ambulance, her mind racing with a desperate frantic energy. The deal she had struck with Marianne was dead. She had given up Julian’s passwords, his offshore routing numbers, and the locations of his physical safe deposit boxes, believing she would receive a clean slate and a modest sum to start over in a new city. Instead, Marianne had discarded her the moment the warrants were served, leaving her injured on the marble floor to face both the wreckage of her marriage and the impending criminal charges for conspiracy and corporate fraud. Clara realized too late that playing chess with a grandmaster like Marianne was a fool’s errand. Marianne didn’t want partners; she wanted total annihilation of everyone who had ever wronged her. As the ambulance bounced over a pothole in the downtown street, Clara groaned in pain, her hand twitching against the straps. She knew that once she reached the hospital, federal agents would be waiting outside her room to take her formal statement, and unlike the private agreement she thought she had with Marianne, this statement would be entered into public record. She was facing twenty years behind bars for her role in laundering embezzled pension funds. The irony was suffocating: she had betrayed the man she loved out of greed and self-preservation, only to end up in handcuffs just as surely as he was. The paramedic shined a small penlight into her eyes, checking her pupils for concussion symptoms, but Clara barely felt the light. Her thoughts were consumed by a cold, hard resolve. If Marianne thought she would go down quietly while the older woman claimed all the remaining spoils, she had severely underestimated Clara's survival instinct.
