Chapter 30 30
The McLaren family had officially hit rock bottom, but their stubborn pride refused to let them admit it. In a cramped, single-room apartment with flaking paint and a leaky faucet, the once-pristine legacy of the McLarens sat hunched over greasy takeout containers they could barely afford. They no longer dined on truffle pasta or aged steak. Tonight, dinner was a shared bowl of cheap ramen and a stale half-bag of corn chips, bought from a corner convenience store after selling Ivy’s last designer handbag online.
Their stomachs grumbled louder than their pride could silence, and the stress weighed on them like chains.
Elias sat in the corner of the room, hunched over an old laptop he’d borrowed from a pawnshop with an IOU note. He wore a fraying, oversized polo and threadbare slacks. The shoes on his feet were once Italian leather—now cracked, peeled, and dull with age. His knuckles were white, gripping the mouse as he clicked through the cigar company's shareholder portal. His eyes, bloodshot and sunken, narrowed at the red alerts on screen: Shares sold. Transfer complete. Ownership updated. Confidential. Each line was like a knife in his gut.
“Another one?” he muttered hoarsely.
“What?” Norma snapped from the mattress on the floor, where she had draped a towel over her face to block the flickering ceiling light. Her once-glamorous nails were chipped, and her dyed hair was sprouting visible gray roots.
“Another chunk gone. Fifteen percent. Gone. To a damn shell company with a dummy board. It’s like a ghost is buying us piece by piece.”
“Well maybe if you hadn’t burned all our bridges, someone would’ve loaned us enough to buy back at least something,” she snarled, yanking the towel off her face and sitting up. “God, Elias, you’re useless. You should’ve retired five years ago.”
“You should’ve shut your mouth twenty years ago!” he barked, slamming the laptop closed. “You don’t know anything about business! You think I liked having to call Viktor for a loan? That man sold arms during wartime!”
“Maybe he should’ve sold you instead,” Ivy muttered from where she sat cross-legged near the closet, dressed in an oversized hoodie that used to belong to a maid she once screamed at for “breathing too loud.” Her hair was in a greasy bun, and she was trying to scrub a stain off her only pair of leggings.
“Oh, shut up, Ivy,” snapped Era, who was fighting Venice over the last soda can. “All you’ve done is complain about your split ends and the fact that TikTok trolls think you're the ‘least hot’ McLaren.”
“Because I was hot!” Ivy shrieked, standing up. “We were all hot! Until we started showering in cold water with gas station soap!”
Venice flopped onto a pillow, groaning. “This is hell. Literal hell. I used to be invited to afterparties with Grammy winners. Now I’m afraid to check Twitter.”
As if on cue, a notification pinged from Era’s cracked phone screen. She picked it up and paled. “Oh my God.”
“What?” Elias demanded.
“It’s another maid. From, like, five years ago. She’s on a podcast this time. Talking about how Venice threw a glass at her for folding towels wrong. It’s trending again—hashtag JusticeForTheHelp is climbing.”
Norma stumbled to the window and flung it open, yelling into the alleyway, “This is a smear campaign! My enemies are trying to destroy me!”
The only response was a drunk man yelling back, “Shut the hell up, lady!”
Elias rubbed his temples. A thin streak of white now ran through his dark hair, aged prematurely in the span of weeks. The once-proud patriarch was now just a desperate, bitter man in a worn-out undershirt that clung too tightly around his middle.
“They’re vultures,” he muttered, pacing in the little space between the mattress and the broken coffee table. “Circling. Waiting for us to die.”
Norma kicked an empty can. “Where are the lawyers?! The publicists?!”
“We don’t have lawyers anymore, Norma!” Elias shouted. “They dropped us the minute our accounts were frozen!”
“Then get them back!” she hissed, grabbing the laptop. “Do something for once!”
“I’m trying to track the buyers! But they’re ghosts. Ghosts with money. Ghosts with connections. Someone is doing this with surgical precision!”
Ivy, clutching her tablet like it was still a lifeline to her past life, tried to post a “statement” on social media. Something vague and emotionally manipulative like: “In times like this, we learn who we really are. I never claimed to be perfect. But I believe in love. And redemption. And Chanel.” It was met with 8,000 quote-tweets mocking her spelling of “redemption” as “redemtion.”
Her attempt to clap back—“U all are just mad ur poor and ugly lol 💅”—was even worse. She was blocked from the platform an hour later for “targeted harassment.”
Elias’s head was pounding. “I can’t take it anymore. This—this is a curse. She’s cursed us.”
“Don’t say her name,” Norma spat. “We don’t speak of dead weight.”
“Dead weight?” Elias froze. His face paled as a memory sliced through the fog of his rage. That night. The kitchen. The blood. Krystal. She didn’t scream. She just looked at him. Then silence.
But the landlord said she moved out. Quietly. Without notice. Paid everything in advance. Cleaned the place spotless.
If she was dead… who moved out?
He sat back down slowly. A cold chill ran down his spine. “She’s alive,” he whispered.
“What?” Ivy turned.
Elias looked haunted. “Krystal. She’s alive.”
No one spoke.
The room, for all its chaos, went deathly silent. And still—still no one dared say it aloud.
The air reeked of stale instant noodles and something faintly metallic—probably from the rusty sink that hadn't been cleaned in ages. Torn blinds barely filtered the sun. The couch was threadbare, half-eaten by moths, with stuffing leaking from the sides. The apartment wasn’t just small; it was suffocating.
Elias sat slumped in a creaking chair with a cigarette trembling between his fingers, dark circles carved deep under his eyes. His expensive suit, the one he used to wear to board meetings and media interviews, looked like it had been fished out of a donation bin—frayed, wrinkled, and sagging on his shoulders. His once jet-black hair had begun to show swaths of white, stress-painted like cruel streaks of time.
Norma paced the room barefoot in one of Ivy’s old oversized shirts, muttering curses at the floor. Ivy lay sprawled on the couch in mismatched Walmart joggers and a college hoodie from a university she’d dropped out of, holding a dying phone with 3% battery like it was her last lifeline. Venice, makeup-less and jittery, was eating dry cereal from a Tupperware, spooning it in like it might run away. Era sat in a corner scrolling endlessly on her cracked tablet, staring blankly at a live stream of former McLaren maids spilling dirt with the hashtag #JusticeForTheHelp flashing repeatedly on the side.
The apartment buzzed with tension—and the faint whir of a fan that was taped together with hope and duct tape.
And then MJ stood up.
She had been sitting quietly by the wall, chewing the same piece of gum for over an hour now. Her arms were crossed, and her brows drawn in irritation—not just at the room, or the stench, or the heat—but at them.
“Seriously, people? We’re still pretending we don’t know?” she said, voice cold.
Everyone froze.