Vivian to the floor and securing her wrists with zip-ties. I didn’t spare her another glance. I ran to Celeste, dropping to my knees and pulling her frail body into my arms.
She felt as light as a bird, but her grip on my coat was astonishingly strong. She buried her face in my shoulder, and for the first time since this nightmare began, I let out a jagged sob.
“I’ve got you,” I whispered into her hair, rocking her back and forth. “I’ve got you, Celeste. You’re going home.”
Celeste pulled back slightly, looking into my eyes. She reached a trembling hand up to touch my cheek. “The babies…?”
“They’re safe,” I promised her. “They are perfectly safe.”
Celeste looked past me, toward the massive steel door of the vault. The blinking red light of the biometric scanner pulsed in the gloom.
“Leave it locked,” Celeste whispered. “Let his
ghosts rot in the dark.”
I looked at the vault. Billions of dollars sat behind that door. The ultimate prize. The thing that had corrupted Graham, driven Vivian to madness, and turned Marcus into a traitor.
I turned back to my sister and smiled.
“Let it rot,” I agreed.
Six months later, the Harrington name was nothing but a cautionary tale printed in the back pages of the financial times.
Graham pleaded guilty to forty-two counts of wire fraud and embezzlement. Without Vivian’s money to buy a high-priced defense, he was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison. He writes me letters, begging to see “our” sons. I burn them unread.
Marcus was disbarred and indicted for corporate espionage and extortion. The true irony was that his own obsession with the vault blinded him to the empire he could have built legally. He’ll spend the next decade in a cell
