Chapter 6 - The Blood-Stained Legacy
The silence in the hospital room was suffocating. I sat frozen, every nerve ending in my body screaming with unimaginable pain as Nellie’s words hung in the air.
“I laid there in the dirt under that steel beam,” Nellie sobbed, her entire frame shaking. “Holding my son’s cold hand while his life faded away. My leg was shattered beneath the concrete. And do you know who walked up to us while the paramedics were cutting us out?”
I couldn't speak. I could only stare at her with wide, terrified eyes.
“Your mother,” Nellie whispered, her voice dripping with pure poison. “Katie Carpenter walked onto that construction site in her designer boots. She looked down at my dying boy, then looked at me. And do you know what she said, Alistair?”
I shook my head slowly, praying to lose my hearing, praying to wake up from this nightmare.
“She bent down,” Nellie said, “and whispered into my ear: 'I told you fifteen years ago that this boy didn't belong in our family. Now he won't ever be a problem again.'”
A guttural, monstrous cry tore from my throat. I fell forward off my chair, slamming my hands into the carpet, weeping uncontrollably, screaming into the empty air of the room.
My own mother. My own flesh and blood had stood over her dying grandson and felt nothing but satisfaction.
“She had her lawyers threaten the hospital,” Nellie continued, her voice going deathly calm again. “If I spoke to the press, she promised to have me committed to a state psychiatric facility. They amputated my leg, threw me out onto the street with no money and no home, and buried my boy in an unmarked grave at Pine Ridge Cemetery.”
She looked down at me as I lay broken on the floor.
“For five years, I have lived under that bridge, Alistair. Not because I couldn't find a shelter, but because every time I looked at a building with the Carpenter name on it, I wanted to die. I stayed in the mud because that’s where your family left my son.”
I slowly pushed myself up from the floor. The grief that had consumed me for four days began to transform into something terrifying, something icy and absolute.
The despair was gone. In its place was a burning, demonic need for vengeance.
I walked over to the window, looking out over the city of Minneapolis. Crestview Clinic, Gilbert Pharmaceuticals, the Carpenter Trust—empires built on the blood of an innocent ten-year-old boy and the destruction of the only woman I had ever truly loved.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket.
“Thomas,” I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion.
“Yes, Doctor?” Thomas answered immediately.
“Call Marcus Vance, the managing partner of Vance & Sterling. Tell him I am invoking my executive right as primary beneficiary of the Carpenter Family Trust.”
“Doctor… if you do that, your mother and wife will be notified immediately—”
“I want them notified,” I said. “Tell Marcus to prepare a complete liquidation of every stock, asset, and land deed tied to the Carpenter name. And call the State Attorney General’s Office. Tell him Dr. Alistair Carpenter wants to turn himself in for corporate manslaughter—and that I have fifteen years of evidence to share about Gilbert Pharma.”
I hung up the phone and turned back to Nellie.
She was watching me, a faint trace of shock in her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she asked softly.
May you like
I walked up to her bed, knelt beside her, and gently took her scarred hand in mine.
“Fifteen years ago, I was a coward, Nellie,” I said, looking straight into her eyes. “I let my mother steal my life, my son, and my soul. I can’t bring Sawyer back. I can’t give you your leg back. But before I go to prison, I am going to burn their world down until there is nothing left but ashes.”
