Chapter 34 - The Final Plea
A few months after Marcus’s conviction, I received an unexpected, heavily monitored call from the medical wing of the state penitentiary. Eleanor had suffered a massive, catastrophic stroke. The prison warden informed me she was in her final hours and had explicitly requested to see me. My initial instinct was to hang up. This was the woman who had criticized my career, orchestrated a massive extortion scheme, and physically held me down while her son violated my bodily autonomy with a pair of shears. But the warrior I had become knew that avoiding her would mean she still held some fragment of power over my mind.
I walked into the sterile, depressing prison hospital room. Eleanor looked nothing like the terrifying, manipulative matriarch she once was. She was frail, hooked up to a ventilator, her skin pale and paper-thin. When she saw me, her eyes widened, and a single tear rolled down her sunken cheek. She couldn't speak, but she managed to weakly reach her bruised, IV-covered hand toward me, an unmistakable plea for forgiveness, for some kind of absolution before she faced whatever came next.
I stood at the foot of her bed, immaculate and unbothered, looking down at the woman who had tried to destroy me. I didn't feel rage anymore. I just felt an overwhelming sense of victory. "I'm not going to forgive you, Eleanor," I said, my voice quiet but echoing with absolute finality. "You don't get to buy peace at the very end after a lifetime of cruelty. But I want you to know this before you go: you tried to break my spirit and strip my savings. Instead, you gave me the tools to build an empire. Everything I have now, all the power and the freedom, was built on the ashes of your failure." I turned on my heel and walked out of the room without looking back. An hour later, as I was driving back to my penthouse, the prison called to confirm she had passed away. The nightmare was officially, permanently dead.
