Chapter 9 - The Socialite’s Ruin
In the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the visiting room smelled of industrial floor stripper, cold metal, and human despair.
Victoria Vance sat behind the reinforced partition, wearing a faded orange prison jumpsuit that was three sizes too large for her thin frame. Her manicured acrylic nails were gone, chewed down to raw, bleeding cuticles. Her platinum blonde hair was greasy and pulled back in an uneven knot. She looked twenty years older than the radiant, cruel socialite who had ripped my clothes open at the gala forty-eight hours ago.
The heavy steel door on the visitor side buzzed and clicked open.
Victoria looked up, her bloodshot eyes widening with sudden, desperate hope. "Julian? Dad?"
It was me.
I sat down on the metal stool on the opposite side of the partition and picked up the black plastic telephone receiver.
Victoria hesitated, her trembling hand reaching for her phone as if it were a venomous snake. She lifted it to her ear, pressing her face against the scratched, smudged glass.
"Are you happy now?" she hissed, her voice vibrating with venomous, impotent rage. "You put your own sister in a cage! Look at me, Lauren! Look at what you've done to me!"
"I didn't forge the invoices for your fashion label, Victoria," I replied evenly, my voice smooth and untouched by her anger. "I didn't funnel seven million dollars of laundered defense money through your offshore shell companies to buy penthouses in Paris."
"I didn't know!" she screamed, slamming her small fist against the glass. The guard at the back of the room shifted his stance, his hand resting on his baton, but I held up a single finger, signaling him to stand down. "Dad told me to sign those papers! He said it was a tax strategy! You know how Dad is! You can't say no to him!"
"I said no," I answered. "Six years ago. And when I said no, you cheered while he threw me into the street."
Victoria choked back a sob, the anger evaporating into the pathetic, self-pitying terror that had always lived beneath her arrogance. "Lauren... please. The prosecutors are offering me a plea deal. Ten years in federal prison. Ten years! I'll die in here! The women in this cell block... they know who I am. They hate me. You have the Admiral. You have the President. Tell them I was just a victim! Tell them I was manipulated!"
I looked at her through the scratched glass.
I looked for the cruel girl who had spent her life mocking the less fortunate. I looked for the sister who had publicly exposed my deepest wounds to draw cheap laughter from a room full of cowards.
All I saw was a hollow shell.
"When I was on the *Vanguard*," I told her, my voice quiet and calm, "there was a young sailor named Petty Officer Jenkins. He was nineteen. When the steam pipe blew, he was pinned under a three-ton generator. He knew he wasn't going to make it out. Do you know what he asked me while the compartment was filling with poison?"
Victoria sniffled, wiping her nose with the coarse sleeve of her orange jumpsuit. "What?"
"He didn't ask me to save his money. He didn't ask me to pity him. He gave me a picture of his mother and asked me to tell her that he did his duty to the very end."
I leaned in closer to the glass.
"You had everything this world could offer, Victoria. Millions of dollars, health, luxury, and privilege. And yet, you never learned what it meant to have honor. Now, you’ll have ten years in a cold room to think about that."
"Lauren! Don't hang up! Don't leave me here! Lauren!" she screamed, her voice cracking into high-pitched wails as the tears flooded down her face.
I placed the plastic receiver back onto its cradle.
May you like
I stood up, smoothed down the front of my dress uniform, and walked toward the exit. Behind me, Victoria’s frantic pounding against the partition was cut short as the heavy steel door slammed shut, sealing her into the darkness she had spent a lifetime building.
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