Chapter 8 - The Iron Gate
The sound of my voice bouncing off the granite cliffs hit them like a physical blow.
Beatrice froze. Her fists remained pressed against the steel, her face turning up toward the glass terrace perched high above. Caleb stumbled backward two steps, pulling his hood over his head as if expecting a sniper round.
"Clara!" Beatrice yelled, forcing her voice into a frantic pitch of authority. "Clara, stop this childish nonsense! Open this gate! We drove three hours to get up here! We are family, and we are going to sit down at a table like civilized human beings and resolve this!"
"Civilized?" I asked through the intercom.
The sound was so clear they could hear the faint clink of ice in my glass.
"The last time we sat down at a table like civilized human beings, Beatrice, you poured a pot of boiling coffee onto my head while your children filmed it for digital pocket change."
"That was a mistake!" Caleb yelled, stepping forward, his face twisted in desperate pleading. He looked directly at the main camera lens. "Clara, look at me! It’s Caleb! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry! I was stupid! I was chasing clicks! You know how hard it is in Denver, everyone’s competing, everyone’s showing off... I didn't think it would hurt you! I lost everything today, Clara! Everything! My job, my apartment, my car! Just... just call Sterling and tell him you changed your mind! Please!"
"You didn't think boiling water would hurt human skin, Caleb?" I asked. "You graduated from business school. You understand thermodynamics. You just didn't care, because to you, I wasn't human. I was an engagement metric."
"Clara, please!" Maya screamed, running to the gate, her manicured fingers clawing at the steel mesh. Her mascara had run down her cheeks in black, grotesque tracks. "My entire life is gone! Every brand canceled me! People are outside my apartment building! They’re calling me a monster! I can’t go outside! Clara, you have hundreds of millions of dollars! Just give me fifty thousand! Just fifty thousand so I can move to Europe until this blows over! That’s nothing to you! It’s pocket change!"
I looked down at the three of them through the floor-to-ceiling glass of my office.
They looked like rats trapped at the bottom of an empty swimming pool.
Not once had any of them asked if the burns hurt. Not once had any of them asked what kind of permanent scars were forming beneath the bandages. Even now, standing outside the fortress I had built with six years of sleepless nights and eighty-hour coding marathons, they only saw me as an ATM they hadn't finished robbing.
"Fifty thousand dollars, Maya?" I said.
Maya nodded frantically. "Yes! Yes, please! You’re my sister!"
"On Sunday," I said, "when I was walking through the lobby of the Obsidian Resort with liquid fire dripping down my back, you leaned over to Caleb and said, *‘Make sure you tag the local news so this goes viral before she washes her hair.’*"
Maya’s mouth dropped open. Her hands slipped from the gate.
"How... how do you—"
"I bought the security footage from the Obsidian’s server five minutes after I left the property," I said. "Every angle. Every microphone. I have you laughing about how I’d probably have to shave my head because the coffee would fuse with the synthetic fibers of my hoodie."
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the mountain.
Even Beatrice couldn't find a lie fast enough to plug that leak.
"You are not family," I said quietly. "You are a collection of appetites that shared a last name with me. And your feast is over."
"Clara!" Beatrice screamed, her voice cracking into pure hysteria. She kicked the gate with the toe of her designer shoe, snapping the heel clean off. She stumbled, catching herself on the rock wall, her face contorted in demonic rage. "You ungrateful little b*tch! I gave you life! You wouldn't even exist without me! I will tear this house down with my bare hands! I will go to every newspaper in this country and tell them who you really are! A cold-blooded, heartless psycho who abandoned her own mother!"
"You won't have to go to the newspapers, Beatrice," I replied.
"What?" she hissed.
"Look down the mountain."
May you like
A quarter-mile below them, the red and blue emergency flashers of three Eagle County Sheriff’s cruisers sliced through the pine canopy, ascending the ridge at fifty miles an hour.
***
