Chapter 8 - The Price of Treason
The visiting room at the Metropolitan Correctional Center was designed to strip away every shred of human pride.
The walls were painted a nauseating industrial green, peeling at the corners. The air was thick with the scent of cheap floor disinfectant and stale sweat. A thick panel of scratch-resistant plexiglass separated the prisoners from their visitors, perforated by small, circular sound holes that forced people to lean in close to be heard.
Damien Cross sat on the hard metal stool, wearing an oversized bright orange jumpsuit that made his tanned skin look sallow and sickly.
His hair was unwashed, hanging limp around his ears. The arrogance that had once defined his every movement had collapsed into a jittery, manic desperation. His fingernails were bitten down to the quick, his eyes darting frantically toward the heavy steel door at the end of the corridor.
The door buzzed and swung open.
Damien sat up straight, his breath catching in his throat. "Monica?" he whispered.
It was not Monica.
Arthur Vance walked into the room, leaning heavily on a silver-tipped walking cane. The eighty-year-old shipping magnate looked older than he had seventy-two hours ago, his weathered face lined with cold, unforgiving granite.
Damien grabbed the receiver on the wall with trembling hands. "Arthur! Arthur, thank God! Did you speak to the bail commissioner? Did you get the appellate judge to review the freeze on my offshore accounts?"
Arthur Vance did not pick up his receiver immediately.
He stood on the other side of the glass, looking down at Damien with an expression of profound, sickening contempt. Slowly, methodically, the old man sat down on the bolted plastic chair, lifted his receiver, and brought it to his ear.
"There is no bail, Damien," Arthur said, his voice flat, devoid of any warmth or mercy. "The Department of Justice filed eighteen additional counts this morning under the RICO statutes. Wire fraud. Interstate transport of stolen sovereign securities. Tax evasion spanning six fiscal cycles."
"It was my mother!" Damien screamed into the receiver, slamming his palm against the glass. "You know Victoria! She controlled the holding companies! I just signed what she gave me! You have to tell them, Arthur! I was your partner!"
"You were an errand boy who got lucky because a princess took pity on you," Arthur hissed, leaning forward until his cold blue eyes were inches from the glass. "Do you have any idea what you have done to my family?"
Damien blinked, stunned. "Your family?"
"My grandfather signed the Harlow-Vance Maritime Accord sixty years ago under the personal guarantee of Duke Christian Cain," Arthur snarled. "For three generations, my family's vessels have sailed under sovereign Danubian naval protection in the Mediterranean. And you—you pathetic, brainless peacock—dragged that sovereign heir into a public ballroom to mock her for social media clout."
"I didn't know!" Damien wailed. "She never told me!"
"Because she knew what you were!" Arthur shouted into the receiver, his voice cracking with rage. "She tested you, Damien! For four years, you had the most powerful alliance on this continent sitting across from you at your kitchen table, and you traded it for cheap champagne, leased sports cars, and the applause of sycophants who forgot your name the second the cuffs clicked around your wrists!"
Arthur slammed his hand against the counter, making Damien flinch backward off his stool.
"Marcus resigned from the board this morning," Arthur continued, his breathing heavy. "The Vance family has surrendered fifteen percent of our municipal port allocations to Benjamin Harlow to settle our liability for your corporate short-selling scheme. We are ruined in this city, Damien. And it is because I trusted a boy whose ambition was three sizes larger than his brain."
Damien fell to his knees on the concrete floor, clutching the receiver wire as if it were a lifeline. "Arthur... don't abandon me here. Please. My mother won't speak to me. Her lawyers told me she’s claiming total mental incompetence and blaming the entire upload on my computer. I have no one, Arthur! No one!"
Arthur Vance slowly stood up.
He looked down at the weeping, shattered man through the scratched glass.
"You have exactly what you brought to that ballroom, Damien," Arthur said softly. "Nothing."
Arthur hung up the receiver.
He turned his back on Damien Cross and walked out of the visiting room without looking back once.
On the other side of the glass, Damien dropped the receiver. It swung back and forth against the wall, a hollow, rhythmic clicking that sounded like a countdown to an empty, endless future.
May you like
Damien pressed his forehead against the cold, stained concrete floor and wept until his throat tore, his cries swallowed entirely by the windowless walls of the federal holding block.
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