Chapter 5 - Checkmate
After that night, the world of high finance was turned upside down.
Lily and I moved into the most luxurious private estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, surrounded by woods and the Long Island Sound. Lily got her own private amusement park, a stable with ponies, twelve round-the-clock nannies, and the best tutors money could buy. The little girl who had been terrified to ask for an ice cream cone became the most revered princess of the East Coast.
But I didn’t drown in the sweetness of revenge. My mind remained ice cold. Revenge was just the appetizer; the future was the main course.
The day after the dinner, I called a press conference that shook the global markets. For fifteen minutes, standing at the podium, I clearly and ruthlessly laid out the Sterling Holdings conglomerate strategy for the next three years. Hostile takeovers, aggressive expansions. The business sharks in the room wiped cold sweat from their brows, realizing I hadn’t dulled my claws on kitchen pots and pans. I had accumulated monstrous power in the shadows.
At the end of the conference, a reporter asked, “Miss Sterling, what can you say about the current situation of your ex-husband, David Thorne, and his company?”
I looked directly into the camera lens and slightly curved my lips. “David Thorne? I’m sorry, I don’t recall such a person.”
The press room gasped. It was the ultimate humiliation. Complete, absolute erasure.
Meanwhile, David was surviving on the very edge of New Jersey, in the rotting slums of an abandoned industrial park. Freezing autumn rain covered the zone in a black shroud. The windowless basement smelled of death.
Bang!
A rusted iron door was kicked off its hinges. A massive thug nicknamed Tommy the Hammer stepped forward, holding a piece of rebar.
A dark lump huddled in the corner convulsed violently and raised its head. It was David. His hair was matted with dirt, his torn shirt soaked in stench.
“Tommy… give me two more days,” David crawled across the wet concrete like a worm, his voice rasping. “My old partners… I’ll pay back the five million.”
“Lend it to you? Yeah, right,” Tommy swung his boot hard into David’s chest. The sickening crunch of breaking ribs echoed in the basement. David flew back, slamming against a wall. Bloody foam erupted from his lips. “Your company was chopped up and sold for scraps weeks ago. You crossed the Sterlings. Not a single dog will give you a dime.”
Tommy pulled out a sharp hunting knife. “Today is the deadline. We’ll cut out a kidney, pop out a cornea… ought to cover a couple mill in interest.”
At that moment, two other thugs dragged a screeching woman into the basement and threw her onto the floor. Chloe. Her face, ruined beyond repair, looked like a Halloween mask.
“Davey… save me,” she wheezed.
“You piece of trash!” David lunged up like a rabid dog, pointing a shaking finger at her. “She’s the one who took the loan! Cut out her kidneys! Sell her for organs! Just let me go!”
Suddenly, a hysterical wail came from a filthy mattress in the corner. Martha Thorne, disheveled and covered in grime, crawled out. Seeing the knife over her son, she grabbed a cracked plate and threw it at Tommy. “Don’t touch my Davey!”
One of the mobsters swatted her away in annoyance, shoving her hard. The old woman slipped. She fell backward, and the back of her head hit the sharp edge of a concrete step with a sickening crack. Martha’s body twitched, and a dark puddle rapidly spread across the concrete. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She was dead before her eyes glazed over.
“Mom!” David screamed, but the blade at his throat forced him to freeze.
“Tch. A dead body complicates things. Grab the bitch,” Tommy nodded at Chloe. She was dragged out the door like a slab of meat, destined for international waters.
David was left alone in the abyss of despair, looking at his mother’s body. Listening to the rain, he lost the last drops of his humanity. In his mind’s eye, he saw my gaze—the gaze of a deity looking at an insect.
If I’m going down, we’re going to die together, his fractured mind reasoned.
Digging through the trash, he found a tabloid newspaper with a paparazzi photo of Lily and me outside an elite Upper East Side pediatric clinic, detailing her rehabilitation schedule. With his last few coins, David bought a meat cleaver at a bodega and hotwired an old delivery van.
On a rainy afternoon, he laid in wait outside the clinic. His bloodshot eyes never left the doors, betting everything on a mother’s fanatical love.
There they were. A uniformed nanny walked out, pushing a closed, high-end stroller covered by a thick black rain-shield.
David flew out of the van like a charging bull. He tackled the nanny into the mud, ripped the blanket-wrapped bundle out of the stroller, threw it into the back of the van, and slammed on the gas.
“Kate! I found your weakness!” he screamed in the cab, flying onto the FDR drive. Steering with one hand, he dialed my number.
“Yes?” My voice was horrifyingly calm.
“Recognize me?” David rasped, trying to hide his terror. “I have your brat. Prepare fifty million to an offshore account and a helicopter at the abandoned lots in the Bronx right now, or you will never see this bastard again!”
Silence on the line. David felt a rush of euphoria. He had stepped on my neck again.
“Fifty million, David? Is your life really worth that much?” A mocking tone bled into my voice. “Before you negotiate, maybe you should look at what you actually stole.”
Cold sweat broke out across David’s body. A terrible premonition crawled down his spine. He slammed on the brakes. The bundle on the passenger seat tumbled over. With shaking hands, he ripped the blanket away.
No crying. No breathing.
Laying on the seat was a hyper-realistic, life-sized silicone medical mannequin. And in the center of the dummy’s chest blinked a red LED light, emitting a soft beep.
“As a father, you couldn’t even remember the weight of your own biological child,” my icy voice sliced through the silence, coming directly from a speaker embedded inside the doll. “Inside that mannequin is a military-grade GPS beacon. From the second you grabbed it, your location and this extortion call have been live-streamed directly to the FBI field office in Manhattan.”
“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.”
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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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