The silence after Steven's fall was a living thing in the Cohen estate,
thick and watchful. Paramedics and police had come and gone, their sterile
efficiency a jarring contrast to the house's Gothic ruin. Julian, numbly giving
his statement, watched them remove the covered body of the man who was his
father. Arthur had not emerged from his study. The staff had been given paid
leave and told not to return. Julian was alone in the mausoleum.
His mind, shocky and frayed, kept returning to the one other living soul
trapped within the walls. Vivian.
He found her not in her bedroom, but in the nursery. The room was a
masterpiece of anticipatory perfection. Cream-coloured walls, a hand-painted
mural of a serene forest, a pristine white crib piled with cashmere blankets.
She stood in the centre of it, still in the elegant silk robe she'd worn to her
disastrous lunch, her back to him. She was utterly motionless, staring at the
empty crib.
"Vivian," he said, his voice hoarse.
She didn't turn. "They said it was a girl on the last scan," she
murmured, her voice disturbingly conversational. "Did I tell you? I had names
picked out. Seraphina. Or Celeste. Something… clean. Untouched."
The normalcy of the words in the wake of blood on the marble floor was
more unsettling than any scream. Julian took a cautious step into the room. The
air smelled of new paint and a faint, floral perfume.
"The police are gone. For now. There will be… more questions."
"Questions," she repeated, as if trying the word out. She finally
turned. Her face was pale, but eerily placid. The frantic, unhinged light from
their last confrontation was gone, replaced by a hollow, frightening calm. Her
gaze drifted over him, not seeing him, seeing something else. "They'll have
questions about the consent forms, won't they? The sourcing. The ethics
committee was so easily satisfied. A generous donation to their new wing does
wonders."
"Vivian," he tried again, a cold dread seeping into his bones. "You need
to speak to a lawyer. Your doctor."
"My doctor," she said, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. "He said I
was the picture of maternal health. Perfect blood pressure. Optimal hormone
levels. A model patient." Her hand drifted to her abdomen, a gentle, possessive
gesture that made Julian's stomach clench. "He never asked about the pictures."
"Pictures?"
"In my dressing room." She turned back to the crib, her voice dropping
to a confidential whisper. "I had them framed. Ultrasound images. The first
little flutter. The profile. My perfect girl." Her whisper grew thinner,
strained. "And next to them… I kept the photos from the safe. Of her. Elora."
Julian went very still.
"I would look at them together," Vivian continued, her tone now one of
clinical curiosity. "My future. And his past. I thought it would feel like a
victory. Watching my reality replace her ghost. But it just felt… empty. The
crib is still empty."
She ran a perfectly manicured finger along the crib's smooth railing.
"They'll take her, you know. When she's born. The courts. The scandal. They'll
say I'm unfit. They'll give her to some agency. Or to you." She looked at him
then, her eyes finally focusing, filled with a terrifying clarity. "You would
try to be kind. You would tell her stories. And eventually, you would tell her
the truth. That her mother was a monster and her father was her brother. That
her whole existence was a sin against nature and a punchline in the papers."
"It doesn't have to be like that," Julian said, but the words sounded
feeble even to him. The machinery of the world was already turning. The scandal
was too great, the crime too visceral.
"It already is," she stated simply. "I built this room for a dream. A
pure Cohen. A fresh start. But there is no fresh start. There's only the rot,
and we are all swimming in it. Arthur in his study, drinking himself into
oblivion. Steven on the marble. And me…" She looked around the beautiful, empty
room. "I am the mother of a ghost who hasn't even been born yet."
She walked past him then, her movements serene, floating. She paused at
the door, not looking back. "The house is so quiet now. Finally. No more
arguing. No more lies. Just… quiet."
She left, the scent of her perfume lingering in the nursery, a sweet,
funereal scent.
Julian gave her space. He spent hours on the phone with lawyers, with
crisis managers, with Silas, who was coordinating security and managing the
fallout from Steven's attempted attacks. He checked once on Arthur—a silhouette
against the window, a bottle of cognac beside him, a monument to defeat.
He didn't see Vivian again. He assumed she'd retired to her rooms. The
profound, waiting silence of the house began to feel less like peace and more
like a held breath.
It was near midnight when he went to her suite. The door was unlocked.
The sitting room was neat, the bed unslept in. On the vanity, the framed
ultrasound photos were arranged in a neat row. And beside them, the photographs
of Elora were gone. In their place was a single sheet of monogrammed
stationery.
The note was not long. In her elegant, unwavering script, it read:
"The design was flawed from the beginning. I cannot build a legacy on
borrowed blood and stolen hope. The world will dissect her, and you. I choose
to spare her that. Keep them away from her. Let her be someone else's story. A
clean one."
It was not signed.
The door to her lavish marble bathroom was ajar. The light was on.
Julian knew, with a certainty that stopped his heart, what he would find. He
also knew he would not open it.
He stood in the silent, opulent bedroom, the note in his hand, the empty
nursery down the hall. The two poles of her madness—the desperate creation and
the final, chilling control. She had sought to engineer a perfect future, and
when that future became just another layer of scandal, she had chosen to unmake
it preemptively. To erase herself from the equation, and in her twisted logic,
to free the child from the taint of her own story.
He didn't call the police immediately. He walked to the nursery first.
He stood in the same spot she had, looking at the pristine, waiting crib. He
understood now that her final act was not just an escape, but the last,
terrible gesture of ownership. She had decided the narrative of her child's
life, just as she had tried to decide everything else. She had written the
ending.
The sound he made was not a sob, but a dry, wrenching expulsion of
air—the sound of a man realising that some ruins are so total, there is nothing
left to bury.
He pulled out his phone, his movements automatic. As he dialled, his
eyes remained fixed on the white crib, a stark symbol of a hope that had
curdled into something unspeakable. The two mothers in this saga—Elora, broken
and institutionalised; Vivian, monstrous and now self-erased—were tragic
bookends to a legacy of poison. And in the centre of it all was his child, not
yet born, already orphaned from truth.
The clean, quiet death of Vivian Cohen was the final, sickening twist.
The fallout was complete. The empire had not just cracked from within; its very
heart had stopped beating in a room that smelled of new paint and despair.