Chapter 3 - The Depths of Poverty
While specialists stabilized Catherine for transfer to the intensive care unit, Victor needed to see the reality his family had endured. Leaving two trusted bodyguards outside Catherine’s room, Victor took Brian and drove back toward the Northside district.
They pulled into an alleyway choked with garbage and rusted drainage pipes. The building was a rotting tenement of cracked concrete and flickering neon lights.
Annie had given them the key—a single, bent brass key attached to a faded pink ribbon.
Victor climbed the narrow, pitch-black stairwell, the stench of damp rot and grease thick in the air. On the fourth floor, behind a warped wooden door with a missing deadbolt, lay the sanctuary Catherine had built for their daughter.
The room was no larger than Victor’s private walk-in closet. There was a single twin mattress on the floor, covered with a threadbare blanket. An old electric hotplate sat atop an overturned plastic crate. On a small wooden table rested three items: a bowl containing stale water, an empty tin of beans, and a framed photograph of Victor, Catherine, and baby Annie taken on the beach five years ago.
The glass of the frame was wiped immaculate, free of a single speck of dust.
Victor walked over to the closet. Inside hung two faded aprons from a twenty-four-hour diner, one patched wool coat, and Annie’s single school uniform, washed so often the fabric was nearly translucent.
In an open cardboard box beside the mattress, Victor found a stack of pawn receipts. Her wedding ring. Her pearl earrings—the only gift from Victor she had managed to smuggle out. Her winter boots. All sold to pay for Annie’s school books and cough syrup.
Beneath the receipts was a stack of unopened medical bills totaling three hundred dollars—bills Catherine clearly could not pay.
“Fifty thousand dollars a month,” Victor whispered into the dark, hollow room, his voice shaking with violent fury. “For thirty-six months. One point eight million dollars.”
Brian stood in the doorway, his head bowed. “Your mother had the funds rerouted through a shell company in the Cayman Islands called 'Aegis Holdings,' Mr. Williams. She used it to buy jewelry, finance her European cruises, and fund her high-society galas.”
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Victor clenched his fists until his fingernails punctured the skin of his palms. “She stole from a starving mother and child while pretending to mourn their absence. She will pay for every single cent with her freedom.”
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