Chapter 74 - The Cyanide in the Silver Spoon
"And what were you going to do with this?" I asked, gesturing to the piles of bearer bonds and bearer securities filling the aluminum flight cases. "Take the money and vanish while Khloe fought for her life in the Alps?"
Isabella looked at me, a tragic, hollow smile touching her lips. "I was buying our freedom, Mark. In Switzerland, once bearer shares are transferred to a blind panamanian trust, no court, no hitman, and no Vance can ever touch them again. I was laundering Khloe's inheritance so Catherine’s legal hounds could never reclaim it."
"You could have told me!" Khloe yelled, tears of rage spilling over her eyes. "You could have trusted me, Isabella! I thought you were trying to steal my babies!"
"If you knew, you would have gone to the police," Isabella shouted back, slamming her palms onto the table. "And the police are owned by Catherine! The federal judge in Boston who signed the warrant for Anthony’s arrest? On Catherine's payroll! The Swiss border patrol who let the Maybach through the pass? Paid for by Vance shell corporations! The only way to kill a monster like Catherine is to let her think she’s winning until the trap snaps shut!"
Suddenly, the heavy steel door of Vault 880-Delta slammed shut with a deafening metallic clang.
*CLANK-SHUT.*
The mechanical locking bolts engaged with a heavy, automated hydraulic hiss.
The single banker’s lamp on the table flickered and died, plunging the vault into absolute darkness, replaced seconds later by the harsh, blood-red emergency strobes pulsing along the ceiling.
Over the vault's internal intercom speaker, a voice purred—hoarse, burned, and dripping with venom.
*"You always were an articulate little whore, Isabella."*
Khloe spun toward the reinforced observation window above the vault door.
Standing behind the four-inch bulletproof glass, her face wrapped in sterile white burn dressings, her sable coat singed and soaked in dried soot from the helicopter crash, stood Catherine Vance.
In her right hand, she held the manual override key to the vault’s pneumatic ventilation system.
"Did you really believe an engine flare could kill me?" Catherine rasped through the speaker. "Anthony was a fool. You, Isabella, are a thieving parasite. And you, Khloe... my darling, discarded daughter... you should have died in that incubator twenty-four years ago."
Catherine turned a brass valve on the wall beside the glass.
Above our heads, the ventilation grates hissed open. A sweet, bitter smell—like burnt almonds—began to pour into the sealed chamber.
May you like
Hydrogen cyanide.
***
