Chapter 9 - The Boy Left Behind
Revenge is a funny thing,
it burns hot and bright,
consuming everything in its path,
but it often leaves collateral damage that you never fully anticipated.
The boy,
Lucas,
was twelve years old,
innocent in the grand scheme of his mother's greed and his father's corruption.
He had grown up believing Victor was his hero,
believing that his life was a fairytale,
unaware that he was nothing more than a biological pawn in a twisted game of chess.
After the cars were repossessed,
after the mansion was foreclosed upon,
Melissa had dragged him to a dirty,
cramped apartment on the wrong side of the city.
I had hired a private investigator to keep an eye on them,
not out of compassion,
but out of a deep-seated need to ensure that they never tried to crawl back into my life.
The photos the investigator sent me were pathetic,
showing Melissa drinking heavily,
screaming at the walls,
blaming the world for her self-inflicted ruin.
But the pictures of Lucas were different,
they showed a boy with hollow eyes,
sitting on the steps of the rundown apartment building,
wearing clothes that were suddenly too small,
looking completely lost and abandoned.
One afternoon,
I had my driver park across the street from his new school,
a crumbling public building with barred windows and chain-link fences.
I watched as the bell rang,
and a flood of noisy,
chaotic children poured out into the street.
Lucas walked out slowly,
his head down,
his shoulders slumped under the weight of a cheap,
frayed backpack,
a stark contrast to the designer bags he used to carry.
He didn't have a chauffeur waiting for him anymore,
he didn't have a warm mansion to return to,
and he certainly didn't have a mother who cared about anything other than her lost money.
I watched him walk toward the bus stop,
rain beginning to drizzle from the grey sky,
soaking into his thin jacket.
For a brief,
fleeting moment,
I felt a tiny prick of guilt in my chest,
a microscopic shadow of the motherly instinct that had driven me to raise Ethan with so much love.
This boy didn't ask to be born to a gold-digger,
he didn't ask to be fathered by a corrupt lawyer,
and he didn't deserve to bear the punishment of their sins.
But then I remembered the hospital room,
I remembered Melissa's smug smile,
I remembered Victor's cruel eyes waiting for me to break,
and that tiny prick of guilt vanished,
replaced by cold,
hard steel.
I rolled down the window,
signaling my driver to honk the horn,
a loud,
blaring sound that made Lucas jump and look over.
He recognized the car,
he recognized my face through the tinted glass,
and for a moment,
he just stood there in the rain,
staring at the woman who had single-handedly destroyed his entire universe.
I didn't smile,
I didn't frown,
I simply held his gaze,
letting him see the absolute finality of my presence.
I reached into an envelope beside me,
containing a fully funded trust document,
enough money to pay for his college education,
locked away until he turned eighteen,
inaccessible to his greedy mother.
I handed the envelope to my security guard in the front seat.
"Give this to the boy," I instructed quietly,
"Tell him it is the only thing he will ever receive from the Vance family,
and tell him never to look for us again."
The guard nodded,
stepping out into the rain,
handing the heavy envelope to the bewildered child,
delivering my final,
cold act of charity.
I rolled up the window,
turning my face forward.
"Drive," I told the chauffeur,
May you like
leaving the boy in the rearview mirror,
closing the book on his existence permanently.
