The drive to the Upstate Correctional Facility was a three-hour descent into a past Elara had tried to incinerate. As the vibrant, chaotic skyline of Brooklyn faded into the rearview mirror, replaced by the skeletal trees and gray, rolling hills of the Hudson Valley, Elara felt the air in the car grow thin. She kept the diamond earring on the passenger seat, sitting in its velvet box like a small, radioactive isotope. Every time she hit a bump in the road, the light would catch the stone, sending a flash of brilliance across the ceiling—a constant, rhythmic reminder that she was being pulled back into Julian's orbit.
She pulled into the visitor parking lot just as the sun began to dip below the horizon, casting long, jagged shadows across the asphalt. The prison loomed like a concrete cathedral of misery. High walls topped with coils of razor wire shimmered under the orange glow of the security floodlights. To the rest of the world, this was a place where criminals were erased. To Elara, it felt like she was walking back into a lion's den, voluntarily offering her throat.
The intake process was a series of small, calculated humiliations designed to strip away the visitor's dignity before they even reached the cells. Elara stood in the sterile, white-tiled room, her arms raised as a female guard performed a slow, clinical pat-down. The guard's hands were cold through Elara's thin sweater.
"Jewelry in the locker, miss," the guard said, her voice a flat, tired monotone.
Elara placed the velvet box in the small metal cubby, her heart thudding against her ribs. She felt naked without the "peace" she had cultivated over the last year. After passing through two more buzzing iron gates and a metal detector that screamed at the zipper of her boots, she was led into the visiting room.
It was a vast, echoing hall partitioned by thick panels of scratched, yellowing Plexiglas. The air smelled of industrial bleach, floor wax, and the stale, sour scent of a hundred desperate conversations. Elara sat at station fourteen. She waited for ten minutes, her hands folded in her lap, watching the heavy steel door at the far end of the room.
When Julian Vane finally walked through, the atmosphere in the room shifted. Even in a coarse, oversized orange jumpsuit, he carried himself with a terrifying elegance. He didn't look like a man who had spent a year in a six-by-nine-foot box; he looked like a king who had simply decided to move his court underground. His hair was cropped closer to his skull now, accentuating the sharp, aristocratic lines of his face and the cold, predatory intelligence in his gray eyes.
He sat down and picked up the heavy plastic receiver. Elara followed suit, her fingers trembling so violently she had to grip the cord to steady herself.
"You look pale, Elara," Julian said. His voice was a low, melodic baritone that bypassed the static of the phone line, sounding as intimate as if he were whispering against her skin in the dark. "The Brooklyn air doesn't seem to suit you. Or perhaps it's the guilt. It's a heavy thing to carry alone, isn't it?"
"How did you do it, Julian?" Elara's voice was a jagged blade of a whisper. "The earring. The man in the suit. How are you reaching out of this place?"
Julian leaned forward, his forehead almost touching the glass. He smiled—a slow, practiced expression that didn't reach his eyes. "I told you once, didn't I? I am an architect. I don't just build skyscrapers and foundations; I build systems. A prison is just another structure, Elara. It has doors, it has windows, and most importantly, it has people with prices. Did you really think twelve inches of concrete could stop me from looking after what belongs to me?"
"I don't belong to you," she snapped, the fire of her anger finally rising above her fear. "I am the one who testified. I am the reason you're wearing that orange suit. If you think a piece of jewelry is going to make me forget the cliff, you're more delusional than I thought."
Julian's smile didn't falter, but his eyes turned as hard as flint. "The earring wasn't a gift of affection, Elara. It was a GPS coordinate. I sent it because I needed to see if you were still brave enough to come when I called. And here you are."
He lowered his voice, glancing toward the guard at the door before leaning back into the receiver. "My sister, Sophia... she's not content with just the scraps I left her. She's liquidating the offshore accounts. She's erasing the paper trail. And the only thing left that connects her to the Foundation's 'irregularities' is a girl in a Brooklyn gallery who knows exactly where the bodies are buried."
Elara felt a jolt of ice in her gut. "You're lying. You're trying to turn me against her so I'll help you with your appeal."
"Check the news when you get home, Anchor," Julian whispered. "The FBI didn't close the file on the Vane Foundation. They just moved it to a higher desk. Sophia needs someone to take the fall for the Singapore transfers—transfers that happened while I was already in custody. She's going to frame you for the secondary embezzlement, Elara. And the man in the charcoal suit? He wasn't sent by me to watch you. He was sent by her to ensure you never get the chance to speak to a grand jury."
The guard tapped his watch. Time was up.
Julian stood, but he didn't hang up the phone. He pressed his palm against the glass, his eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that felt like a physical weight. "The second earring is in a locker at Grand Central. Station 402. The key is taped to the underside of the park bench where we first met. Get it before Sophia's men do, Elara. Or don't. But if you stay in that gallery, you're just waiting for the hill to collapse on top of you."
He hung up and turned away, his back straight and unyielding as he was led back into the shadows of the prison. Elara sat frozen, the dial tone humming in her ear like a swarm of angry hornets. She looked at her reflection in the scratched glass—the reflection of a woman who had thought she was free, only to realize she had been standing on a trapdoor the entire time.
As she walked out of the prison and into the cool night air, the silence was louder than ever. She knew what she had to do. She wasn't going home. She was going to Grand Central.