Chapter Forty-two
Sloane
Rikers Island — 3 Weeks Later
The smell of this place is a physical weight. It's a sickening cocktail of industrial floor wax, sour milk, and the metallic tang of collective fear. But lately, there's a new scent—one only I can perceive. Everything smells like iron. Everything smells like rot. Everything makes my throat close up.
I am hunched over the stainless-steel toilet in the corner of my cell, my body racked by a dry heave so violent it feels like it's trying to turn me inside out. The fluorescent lights overhead hum with a frequency that vibrates in my teeth, making the nausea spike in rhythmic waves.
Symptoms. I am a woman of data; I should have seen the patterns. I should have audited the shift in my own body.
I thought the dizziness was the lack of sunlight. I thought the cramping was the sheer, bone-deep stress of the indictment. I thought the fact that I couldn't keep down the grey, lukewarm "scrambled eggs" was just my body's natural rejection of prison life.
But as I sit on the cold concrete floor, my forehead pressed against the damp, weeping wall, a memory flashes through the haze of my exhaustion. The office. The rug. The night before the FBI shattered the glass doors and my life.
Vane's hands. The raw, desperate reclamation. The way we moved past the "No Emotion" clause and straight into a territory of pure, unshielded wreckage. We hadn't used protection. I wasn't on the pill; the "Hunt" in the Hamptons and Vane's relentless "Audit" had disrupted my schedule so thoroughly I'd forgotten the basic maintenance of my own body.
I am thirty-two days late.
The realization hits me harder than the arrest ever did. It's a cold, leaden weight in the pit of my stomach. I am in a cage. I am facing twenty years for a crime I didn't commit. And I am carrying a child into a shattered empire—a child conceived in the middle of a war, belonging to a man who is currently a prisoner in his own palace.
"Vance! Stand for count!"
The guard's voice is a whip-crack against the bars. I try to stand, but the world tilts on its axis, the grey walls spinning in a nauseating blur. My stomach flips again, and a cold, greasy sweat breaks out across my hairline. I grip the edge of the bunk, my knuckles white, forcing my legs to hold.
I have to stay silent. I have to bury this.
If the media finds out, I'm the "gold-digger" using a pregnancy as a tactical escape from a felony. If the Board finds out, they'll see the child as a liability to be liquidated.
And if Vane finds out...
God, if Vane finds out, he will turn the world into a graveyard to get me out. He will break every law, burn every bridge, and in doing so, he will provide the prosecution with every scrap of "coercion" and "obsession" evidence they need to bury us both forever.
I stand at the bars, my hand instinctively fluttering over my still-flat stomach. For three years, I was his proxy. Now, I am the vault for the only thing Arthur Sterling can't deep-fake.
Vane Sterling's blood.