Chapter 260 Impossible!

Chapter 260 Impossible!
Chapter Two Hundred And Fifty-Eight

The prison visiting room was institutional in the way of all such rooms, designed with the specific functionality of a space whose purpose was contact without comfort, connection without privacy, the particular bare atmosphere of a place that did not want to be confused with anywhere pleasant.

Aria sat on one side of the table.

She had come alone.

She had told no one she was coming, not Lucian, not Zach, not Lisa, for the same reason she had once gone to Hartwell House alone and once gone to Sylvan Dray’s building alone, which was that there were certain things that needed to be done by herself and this was one of them.

She sat and waited.

She heard him before she saw him.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor, the particular pace of someone being escorted, and then the door, and then Kurt Eugene in the grey of the facility’s standard issue, accompanied by an officer who took a position at the wall and became furniture in the way that officers in these rooms did.

Kurt saw her.

His face did several things in rapid succession, the same series it had done in the Vaughn boardroom three months ago but compressed now, moving faster, the sequence of a man whose capacity for management had been significantly diminished by weeks of incarceration and the pending weight of a trial that his legal team had told him, in the careful language of legal teams delivering bad news, was not going to resolve in his favour.

He sat down.

He said nothing for a moment.

She said nothing.

They looked at each other across the table.

“You came,” he said finally.

She gave him a cold smile in agreement.

He looked at her. The look was not the boardroom look, the cold fury of a man who had been outmaneuvered and was processing the outmaneuvering.

This look was different. This was the look of a man who had been sitting in a room with himself for weeks and had had the specific experience of solitary reflection that incarceration provided whether it was wanted or not.

“I want to know something,” he said suddenly, and Aria waited.

She’d specifically come today to gloat at Kurt, and he looked just as depressing as she’d hoped.

Good.

This was just what she needed to calm the fire raging in her.

“The trust,” he said. “The authentication sequence. The executor code.” He paused. “No one could have known that code. No one. I made sure of it. I had legal counsel go through the entire estate structure and they told me the lock was absolute.” He looked at her. “How did you know the code?”

Aria let out a soft laugh. She’d expected the question, and she damn right had an answer for him.

She thought about how to say what she was going to say, in a manner that will further crumble him.

She thought about Elara’s lawyer Cornelius Webb’s face in the boardroom, the specific expression of a man encountering something he could not account for.

She thought about the security footage. About a boy on a pavement with hardening eyes.

She thought about everything she had been carrying since she woke up in a car on a road with a stranger telling her she was being taken to the slaughterhouse.

She cocked her head to the side, a bitter smile lifting the corner of her lips.

“Because I wrote it,” she said.

Kurt looked at her, disbelief and rage etched on his features. He thought Aria was taunting him.

“I wrote it,” Aria said again, her smug smile getting wider. “I set up the trust. I designed the deadman clause. I chose the authentication sequence. I gave the code to Cornelius Webb and I told him to hold it until the person who needed it came to claim it.” She paused, then leaved forward to say in his face, her smile cutting, “I am the person who needed it.”

Kurt was very still, then he gritted his teeth looking furious. The next second, he slammed both fists on the counter before him.

“You fucking bitch!” He bit out, “Are you having fun, huh?”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying, damn you!” he yelled, causing the crowd correctional officer behind him to glare at him warning.

Aria smirked.

“Yes you do,” she said quietly.

He looked at her face.

He looked at it the way he had been looking at it since he sat down, with the particular attention of a man who had been noticing something he could not name and had been trying to name it since she walked through the door.

Aria watched him look.

She watched his eyes move over her face with the specific quality of recognition working its way to the surface through layers of impossibility, taking longer than it would have taken if the thing being recognized were possible, because the mind resisted what it could not account for.

She watched him arrive at it.

She saw it on his face, the moment it landed.

He went white.

Not pale. White. The specific colour of a man from whom something fundamental has been removed in the space of a moment.

“No,” he breathed, “That’s..,that’s not possible…”

She said nothing.

“No,” he said again. “That is not possible! you are not—”

“Yes Kurt,” Aria said finally, “I am Elara Vaughn,” 

The visiting room was very quiet, with Kurt’s jaw dropping open in shock.

The officer at the wall did not move.

Kurt was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before, not in the other life and not in this one, not across conference tables or boardrooms or restaurant dinners or the Vaughn boardroom on the day of the arrests.

He was looking at her with the expression of a man who has spent twenty years building a structure for a specific purpose and has just discovered that the structure was built on a fundamental error.

“That’s not possible,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper.

“And yet,” she said.

Kurt stared at her, horror cascading his features.