“You set me up?!” David shrieked inhumanly, grabbing the cleaver and frantically hacking at the silicone doll.
“No, David,” I replied, the condescension of a god dripping from my words. “It was your bone-deep greed and malice that rolled out the red carpet to your own execution. Since you love kidnapping so much, the curtain falls here.”
Wop-wop-wop.
Directly above the roof of the van, the deafening roar of rotors erupted. Three heavy black SWAT helicopters hovered over the highway like steel hawks. In front of and behind him, the overpass was instantly blockaded by armored FBI Bearcats and the Sterling family’s black Mercedes G-Wagons.
David slid down the seat. The knife fell from his hands. He saw an armored Rolls-Royce Phantom—the symbol of absolute power—pull up ahead.
The door opened. Under a black umbrella, stepping through the puddles in blood-red stilettos, I gracefully walked up to his window. Faced with my cold marble statue face, the last remnants of David’s sanity evaporated.
The SWAT team roughly dragged him out of the van and slammed his face into a muddy puddle on the asphalt.
“Kate! Forgive me! For Lily’s sake, don’t lock me up!” he frantically banged his head against the pavement, covering himself in grime.
“What a pathetic sight you are,” I looked down at him. No hatred. Just the disgust one feels for a crushed caterpillar. “Marriage to you, David… you were never worthy of it.”
I leaned down slightly and whispered in an icy tone, “I forgot to tell you. Your mother died in that basement, and Chloe is already in the cargo hold of a freighter heading into international waters. Now, it’s your turn.”
I stood up straight, closed my umbrella, and stepped into the warm cabin of the limousine. Left behind was only David’s feral, desperate howl and the metallic clack of handcuffs ratcheting shut around his wrists.
A month later, the federal court handed down the sentence. David Thorne, charged with kidnapping, grand extortion, and attempted murder, was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole at ADX Florence, the Supermax Prison in Colorado.
Due to his unpaid debts to the Russian mob, the inmates gave him a warm welcome in holding. By the third week, a brutal brawl left him permanently confined to a wheelchair, completely devoid of his sanity, spending the rest of his days staring blankly at a concrete wall.
Chloe, eventually extradited back to the US, received fifteen years in federal prison for wire fraud and extortion. A cell awaited her, along with a rotting, mutilated face that no surgeon would ever fix.
All the filth finally settled with the sunset.
On a private island in the Mediterranean, the soft sun painted the sand orange. I sat on a swing under the palm trees, wearing a pristine white lace sundress.
“Mommy, look! I found a big seashell!”
A completely healthy Lily, fluttering like a happy butterfly, ran through the surf. Her teeth had grown back perfectly straight and white. Her smile could melt any ice in the world.
I took the shell and hugged my daughter tightly. There was no poverty here, no calculation, no swamp like the one I had thrashed around in for six years. I had reclaimed my empress crown and found the peace of a mother.
“Mommy, are we going to go back to that house?” Lily asked innocently, her big eyes looking up at me.
I looked out at the endless horizon. This was my empire, built and secured with my own hands, which would guarantee my daughter a life without a single dark cloud.
“No,” I kissed the top of Lily’s head, my voice tender but full of absolute, unbreakable power. “Our home is here. From now on, in our world, there is only light.”
The ocean breeze carried away the last dust of the past. The grand era of Catherine and Lily Sterling was only just beginning.
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