Chapter 261 A New Chapter

Chapter 261 A New Chapter
Chapter Two Hundred And Fifty-Nine

She looked back at him.

She thought about a warehouse and a cold floor and her parents’ faces. She thought about Gerald Adler on a rooftop and a nine-year-old boy on a pavement. She thought about twenty years of misplaced vengeance and the specific human cost of a man who had taken his grief and built it into a weapon and aimed it at the wrong target.

She felt, looking at him, something she had not expected to feel.

Not forgiveness. That was too large and too simple a word for the complicated thing that was actually present.

Not satisfaction either, though that was closer.

Something that was adjacent to both of those things but was neither of them, the specific feeling of a woman who has come to the end of something very long and is standing at the conclusion of it and is not the person she was at the beginning.

Kurt was floored with shock but then…

Somehow, he felt… he knew she was right.

Nothing else could explain everything that he’d been going through at her hands all these months. 

This was not a country bumpkin before him.

This was his ex whom he murdered!

“Elara,” he said, and the name in his mouth sounded like something breaking.

Aria glared at him, her green eyes cold enough to freeze the arctic over

“My parents,” she gritted out, and Kurt swallowed hard, his face blanching.

“My parents, Kurt” she said again, her chest heaving with anger. “Say their names.”

He could not, apparently, say their names. His mouth moved and nothing came out.

She watched him.

She thought about Charles Vaughn, her father, who had been a flawed man who had loved her and had made the choices that had contributed to the chain that killed him, and who had not deserved what happened in that warehouse regardless.

She thought about her mother, who had been entirely innocent of everything and had died on a cold floor in an abandoned building because of a debt she did not owe.

“You killed them for something that was not their fault,” she leaned forward, biting the words from her. “You killed them for something that was not even your father’s fault, not entirely, and not mine at all.” She paused. “Your father made his choices. My father made his. Neither of them made the choices you made!”

Kurt’s face was collapsing rapidly.

It was not the collapse she had imagined, in the moments across two lifetimes when she had imagined this conversation.

It was not dramatic.

It was quieter than that and in some ways worse than that, the specific quiet dissolution of a man who has been holding himself together around a purpose and has had the purpose removed.

“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice strangled, “I didn’t know he—I thought your father—I thought he abandoned him. I thought he left him to die.”

“I know what you thought,” she said.

“The footage,” he said. “The rooftop. I found out about the footage after—” He stopped. “After everything. I found out the footage existed after.” His voice was flat and broken and barely functional. “I didn’t know.”

“I know,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Does that change what you did?” she asked, her tone laced with disgust and hatred.

He was quiet for a long time.

“No,” he said. Finally. Barely audibly.

“No,” she agreed.

He looked at his hands on the table.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Elara. I am—I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your parents and I’m sorry for—I’m sorry for all of it. I’m sorry.” He looked up at her, his eyes swimming in tears. “Is there anything….Is there anything I can—I would give it back. Everything. All of it. If I could give it back—”

“You can’t,” Aria said simply.

He looked at her.

“What you took cannot be returned,” she said. “Not my parents. Not the years. Not any of it.” She paused. “The Vaughn Empire is mine again. That part has been returned. The rest of it will never be returned.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him for a long moment.

She thought about what she had come here to do.

She had come here because she needed to say it to his face. Not for his sake. For hers. For the specific completion of a thing that had been open since a warehouse in another life and had needed to be closed with her own words in her own presence, looking at the person who had caused it.

She had said what needed to be said.

“I’m not going to forgive you today,” she said. “I don’t know if I will. That’s not something I can tell you.” She stood. “But I’m also not going to spend another hour of my life on you. I have things that need my attention. A company. A life.” She paused, her throat working rapidly, “A husband who is waiting for me.”

She picked up her bag.

Kurt looked up at her from the other side, his hands clinging in the counter

“Elara,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

God, he regretted everything!

How?! How could things become this way?!

She looked at him, her hatred and disgust palpable.

“I loved you,” he said. “At some point. Somewhere in all of it, I think I actually—”

“No,” she said quietly. “You didn’t. What you loved was the idea of destroying what I had. You mistook proximity to the target for feeling.” She paused. “I hope that someday you understand the difference. I think it would help you.”

She turned and walked to the door.

She did not look back.

The officer let her out and the door closed behind her. The corridor was clean and lit and the sound of the visiting room disappeared behind her and she walked toward the exit with the particular quality of a woman who has put down something very heavy and is learning how her body feels without it.

She came out into the afternoon, her breathing soft but raggedy.

She’d closed this chapter of her life.

From now henceforth, there would only be sunshine and happiness in her life. She’d make sure of it.