PART 4: Confronting the Matriarch
PART 4: Confronting the Matriarch
Hidden family archives break generational curses.
I didn't knock on my mother’s bedroom door.
I kicked it open.
The heavy mahogany doors crashed against the interior plaster walls with a thunderous bang, shattering the silent darkness of her opulent private suite.
Cordelia sat upright in her velvet four-poster bed, wrapped in a silk dressing gown, clutching a silver-framed photograph to her chest as if it could shield her from the wrath standing in her doorway.
“Dashiell! Have you completely lost your mind?!” she shrieked, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and furious indignation. “You do not enter my private rooms like a common savage!”
I walked slowly across the plush carpet, dropping the heavy black binder onto the edge of her embroidered duvet.
The book landed with a dull, sickening thud right over her legs.
“Thirty years ago,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet, carrying a cold, dead weight that made her draw back against the pillows. “Clara Wynn died on a rainy road outside Lake Forest. Her car went through a guardrail. The police called it an accident.”
Cordelia’s face went instantly, chalk-white.
The photograph slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the mattress.
“What... what are you talking about?” she whispered, her lips barely moving.
“I found the file, Mother,” I continued, leaning down over the bed until my face was inches from hers. “Dad paid an investigator to bury the report showing her brake lines had been severed. You engineered it. You wanted her land, her family’s shipping patents, and your husband's complete devotion. You eliminated her just like Ronan and Maren tried to eliminate Evelina.”
“It was business!” Cordelia screamed, the mask finally tearing away entirely as hysteria broke through her voice. “That woman was trying to ruin your father! She was going to take everything we built! We had to protect this family!”
“You didn't protect this family,” I said, straightening up and looking down at her with absolute, unadulterated disgust. “You cursed it. You turned us into a pack of predators wearing designer clothes.”
I pulled out my phone, dialing a direct extension without breaking eye contact with her.
“Vance? Send two officers up to the master suite. My mother is ready to give a full confession to a thirty-year-old homicide investigation.”
Cordelia lunged forward, clawing at my sleeve with desperate, manic strength.
“Dashiell, no! I raised you! I gave you this empire! You cannot send your own mother to prison!”
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“Watch me,” I said, pulling my arm free from her grasp.
As the sound of approaching footsteps echoed up the grand staircase, I turned my back on the woman who had birthed me, letting the past finally burn down to the ground.
