23. Sterling
STERLING
T wo Months Later
The morning air was thick with tension. Zara had left for university, oblivious to what I was about to do. My stepfather and his wife, who had spent their short-lived marriage trying to manipulate their way into controlling me, had pushed too far.
"Annul the marriage," my stepfather demanded, his voice like gravel as he stood in my office, his broad shoulders squared, but his eyes calculating, and wary. "Before this spirals further."
I leaned back in my chair, letting the weight of the moment settle. My mother sat beside him, her disgust palpable. She had never accepted Zara, never wanted to. "She’s carrying my child," I said, my voice dangerously smooth. "This isn’t up for discussion."
My mother scoffed. "That girl tricked you. You think she loves you? She’s securing herself a future she has no right to. If you let this continue, you’ll ruin everything."
I exhaled slowly, tapping my fingers against the mahogany desk. "If I let this continue? You think you have a say in what I do?"
John’s gaze darkened. "The board is furious. They’ve already begun discussing contingencies. Do you understand what you’re risking?"
I smiled. A slow, dangerous curl of my lips. "Oh, I understand perfectly."
Their mistake was thinking they still held power over me.
I stood, moving around my desk, slow and deliberate. "You were always so concerned about appearances. About power. About maintaining the illusion that this family is untouchable." I poured myself a drink, swirling the whiskey lazily, before taking a sip. "But you forgot one thing."
John stiffened. "And what’s that?"
I set the glass down with a sharp clink. "Underneath the suit, I’m a monster."
Before they could react, I pulled my gun from the drawer and shot John between the eyes. My mother gasped, her scream strangled by shock, her body trembling, as John’s corpse slumped forward onto the desk. Blood pooled, dripping onto the floor, staining the polished wood.
"Sterling-" she whispered, eyes wide, her nails digging into the armrests of the chair.
I turned the barrel toward her. "You never did know when to shut up."
One more shot.
Silence.
The twins’ headlights carved a white scar across Kingsley’s private runway, swallowing October fog in greedy gulps.
John Johnston’s corpse was cooling in the Gulfstream’s aft galley freezer; Mother beside him, her pearls scattered like teeth across stainless steel. I promised them Florence for their honeymoon. Technically, I was delivering… bits of them would rain over the Atlantic before sunrise.
Isaiah muscled the cargo door shut. “Payload secured.”
Malachi followed with two jerricans of Jet A-1, and a duffel packed with C-4 bricks, each wired to a military arming switch. Clean burn, no fingerprints.
Frankie adjusted the cuff of his charcoal suit, checking the luminous dial beneath. “ATC still thinks it’s a ferry hop to Newark. No one’s filed the revised plan.”
“Good.” I powered up the tablet, and loaded the ghost flight path I’d built in the simulator. “Autopilot lifts at 02:37, climbs to thirty-two thousand, then dead-heads east. Thirty-two minutes in… boom.”
I tapped the waypoint: EVR-004, a dead slice of international airspace, where radar painted ghosts, and the Atlantic swallowed wreckage whole.
Isaiah arched a brow. “And if the flight recorder survives?”
I tugged a blood-slick wedding band from Johnston’s finger, rolling it between mine. “It won’t.”
Inside the cabin, the air still tasted of gunshot and Chanel No 5. I recorded a voicemail in Mother’s lacquered accent, years of elocution lessons coiling around my tongue:
Darling board, John and I are headed to Italy tonight. Handle the numbers while I’m gone. Kisses.
Frankie overlayed soft cabin hum, and a distant safety-belt chime, then scheduled the message to hit Langford’s private line at dawn. Evidence was sweeter when it seemed to come from the victim herself.
We dragged the bodies into the cockpit jump seats. Malachi buckled them in, then strapped a five-kilo satchel of C-4 beneath the first-officer’s chair. Isaiah doused the aisle in fuel. The stench crawled up my nostrils, sharp enough to burn the memory of blood away.
I lifted the flight recorder from its cradle; orange, innocent, deceitful.
My Zippo’s flame kissed plastic. Black goo ran down my wrist, while data screamed without a sound.
When the casing collapsed, I pitched the molten brick into a fireproof satchel, and sealed it.
God handles confession; I handle legacy.
Frankie paused at the top of the airstairs. “Sterling, once that taxi beacon blinks green, there’s no undo.”
“There was no undo the minute Mother raised her hand against Zara,” I answered. “Get off the plane.”
We cleared the stairs. Isaiah triggered the remote tug, and the Gulfstream rolled toward the threshold like a silver hearse. Twenty feet, fifty, a hundred, then its engines lit, howled, and the aircraft devoured the runway, until only red strobes faked a heartbeat in the mist.
Thirty-one minutes later, we were on a rise of crushed oyster shells overlooking black water. The Jet-A stink still clung to my coat. I watched time on my Breitling, counting heartbeats against altimeter math.
0:31:42.
0:31:55.
0:32:01; light bloomed on the horizon, an artificial sunrise that fractured the night. Metal confetti glittered, then vanished. The Atlantic kept secrets better than I ever could.
I exhaled, tasting jet fuel and absolution. “Release a statement: engine failure over Nantucket Sound. Playing honeymoon surprise, Florence, Amalfi, whatever screams romance.”
Frankie’s thumbs raced across his phone. “Legal will want to know who’s managing their trusts.”
“Tell them grief management falls to me.” I dropped the ruined flight recorder into the waves, and it hissed, then sank. “Draft condolence letters for the board, and every charity Mother courted. I want sympathy flooding inboxes before the sun’s up. Genuine tears optional.”
Malachi snorted. “You think flowers and platitudes keep vultures from circling?”
“Vultures circle carrion,” I answered, wiping soot from my cuff. “I’m very much alive.”
Isaiah nudged me with a sealed envelope. “Death certificates. They’re dated tomorrow. The county coroner owed us a few favors.”
“Good, I can always collect on the others.” I tucked them into my inner pocket.
Frankie pocketed his phone. “Langford’s a shark. He’ll rally the board by noon, demanding a crisis vote.”
“Let him,” I said. “Tomorrow I anchor the consortium with a Kingsley heir the board can’t vote out.”
“You’re sure she’ll say yes on the heels of this?” Isaiah asked, voice pitched low.
I pictured Zara’s violin-callused fingers, the bruises her father left on her wrists, the way her pulse stuttered when my shadow crossed hers. “Tomorrow, I ask Zara to be my wife again, with no forced conditions,” I murmured. “Tonight, I’ve already buried every reason she’ll ever have to say no.”
For her to have the freedom of choice was important. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t going to force her to be with me. Rather, I wanted her to choose to be with me.
A gull cried over the surf, ragged, greedy. I turned away from the smoldering horizon, coat snapping in Atlantic wind, and walked back toward the idling SUV. Behind me, the twins kicked shell dust over our footprints, until even the path home forgot we were there.
Twelve hours later, the world would wake to news that the Kingsley Gulfstream never reached Newark.