Chapter Twenty-Eight
Elena
The verdict came on a Thursday, three weeks into the trial, and Elena sat beside Damon and Marcus in the gallery, holding both their hands, while the jury foreperson read the findings in a voice that seemed, to Elena's overwrought nerves, to take an eternity to reach the words that mattered.
Guilty. On all counts.
The courtroom erupted into a controlled kind of chaos — reporters murmuring, Victor's face going the color of old ash, his attorneys already conferring in low, urgent tones about appeal — and Elena felt Damon's hand tighten around hers hard enough to hurt, his breath coming out in a long, shuddering exhale beside her.
"It's over," he said, disbelieving. "Elena, it's actually over."
"The trial's over," Elena said gently, watching Victor being led from the courtroom in restraints, his careful composure finally, fully shattered. "The rest of it — rebuilding, healing, all of it — that part's just beginning."
Marcus, on Damon's other side, had tears streaming freely down his face, watching the man who'd orchestrated nine years of his exile finally facing consequences that had waited nearly a decade to arrive.
"I used to dream about this moment," Marcus said quietly. "In Lisbon. I used to imagine what it would feel like, watching him held accountable. I never imagined I'd actually get to see it happen."
"You didn't just get to see it," Damon said, turning to his brother with something fierce and grateful in his expression. "You survived long enough to see it. That's not nothing, Marcus. That's everything."
Outside the courthouse, reporters clustered with cameras and shouted questions, and Damon, for the first time in the entire ordeal, didn't retreat behind his careful corporate composure.
He stood on the courthouse steps with Elena's hand in his, Marcus beside him, and answered the questions plainly, honestly, without the careful media management his company's PR team had spent a week preparing him for.
"My family was betrayed by someone we trusted completely," he said, his voice carrying clearly across the crowd of reporters.
"That betrayal cost my parents their lives and cost my brother nine years of exile.
Today, finally, that betrayal has consequences.
I have no further comment beyond gratitude — to the investigators, to my brother's courage in coming forward, and to the woman beside me, without whom none of this would have ever come to light. "
He turned to Elena then, cameras flashing around them, and pressed a kiss to her forehead in full view of half the city's press corps, and Elena, laughing despite the tears in her eyes, understood that whatever came next for them, it would no longer happen in the careful shadows either of them had spent so long hiding in.