Chapter 6 - The Interrogation
"Step away from the door, Ethan," Richard warned, cocking the shotgun with a loud, mechanical *clack* that carried clearly through the thick timber.
"I'm alone, Uncle Richard!" Ethan shouted back. The sound of his fist hammering against the wood was frantic, desperate. "I didn't bring security! I didn't bring the police! Open the damn door before my mother’s tracking team pings my car!"
Richard exchanged a tense, questioning glance with Claire.
Claire’s breath hitched in her throat. Her heart was a battlefield. A part of her—the part that had worn a white veil just six hours ago—wanted to run into his arms, to believe that his rejection at the altar had been a temporary shock. But another part, hardened by the truth of what his family had done, remembered his cold, soulless eyes as he threw the pendant at her feet.
"Let him in," Claire said quietly. "If his mother sent him, he wouldn't be banging on the front door alone."
Richard hesitated, then lowered the barrel of the shotgun. He unbolted the heavy deadbolts and swung the door open.
Ethan stumbled inside, soaked to the skin, his white tuxedo shirt clinging to his muscular frame, plastered in mud and grime. His hair hung in wet curls over his forehead, and his knuckles were bloody—skinned raw, as if he had spent the last three hours beating a concrete wall with his bare hands.
His eyes scanned the room and locked onto Claire.
"Claire," he choked out, taking two stumbling steps toward her.
"Stay right where you are," Richard commanded, keeping the shotgun leveled at his nephew's midsection. "You don't get to play the loving fiancé after the spectacle you allowed your mother to stage today."
Ethan stopped. He looked at the gun, then back at Claire, his face twisting in an agonizing portrait of shame and despair.
"I found the police files, Claire," Ethan said, his voice hoarse, broken. "After I cleared the estate, I went into my father’s private study. The safe behind the portrait of Julianna... I cracked it."
Claire remained seated, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. "And what did you find, Ethan? More evidence to condemn my dead mother?"
Ethan reached into his soaked trouser pocket and pulled out a water-damaged manila folder, throwing it onto the coffee table between them.
"I found the payout receipts from the Swiss insurance company," Ethan whispered, tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. "Twenty-five million dollars, wired to an offshore account in the Caymans four weeks after Julianna’s body was fished out of the river. Signed by my father... and co-signed by Eleanor."
The silence in the room became absolute, save for the crackle of the fireplace.
Ethan dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor, heedless of the puddles forming around his soaked knees. The proud, untouchable heir to the Vance empire was weeping openly, his shoulders shaking with the realization of his family's monstrous nature.
"I spent sixteen years worshipping a shrine to a murdered sister," Ethan sobbed, burying his face in his scarred hands. "I built my whole life around making my mother proud, trying to fill the void of the sister I couldn't save... and my own parents sold her like livestock for a corporate bailout."
Claire rose slowly from the sofa. She walked over to where Ethan knelt, looking down at the man who had abandoned her before hundreds of onlookers.
"You believed her, Ethan," Claire said, her voice steady, stripped of all tears. "When your mother shoved me into that water, when she called my mother a butcher... you looked at me like I was dirt beneath your feet. You didn't defend me. You threw the only thing I had left of my mother into the mud."
Ethan lifted his head, his face wet with tears and rain.
"Because I was a coward," he confessed, his voice trembling with self-loathing. "Because for one terrible second, it was easier to hate you than to accept that my mother was a demon. I was terrified, Claire. Terrified that the woman I loved more than life itself was connected to the nightmare that ruined my childhood."
He reached out, his bloody, trembling fingers hesitating an inch before her clogs, afraid to touch her without permission.
"Please," Ethan begged. "Let me fix this. My mother already sent a team to search your apartment in Brooklyn. She knows Vivian left something behind. If she finds it first, she’ll burn it, and the world will forever believe Vivian Montgomery was a killer."
Claire looked at Richard, who stood by the window, watching the dark driveway. Then she looked back down at Ethan.
"She won't find it in Brooklyn," Claire said coldly, pulling the brass key from her pocket and letting it dangle before Ethan’s eyes. "It’s in Manhattan. In Grand Central Station."
Ethan’s eyes widened at the key.
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"Then we have to move now," Ethan said, scrambling to his feet. "Eleanor has half the NYPD transit division on her payroll. We have less than two hours before the morning rush."
***
