Chapter 6 - The Matriarch's Descent
The St. Regis suite was dark, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and cheap gin. Eleanor Hawthorne paced the floor like a caged, rabid animal.
Her phone rang incessantly. Board members abandoning her. Friends feigning ignorance. Lawyers demanding retainers she could no longer pay. The morning papers had dropped, and Julian Sterling’s expose had obliterated her entire social network. She was ruined.
"You bitch," Eleanor hissed to the empty room, hurling a crystal glass at the television screen that was currently broadcasting Clara’s face on a financial news network.
Her personal assistant, a nervous young man named Toby, stood trembling in the corner. "M-Ma'am? The hotel management called. The credit card you used for the suite declined. They are asking us to vacate by noon."
"I am Eleanor Hawthorne!" she screamed, her perfectly styled hair wild and unkempt. "I built this city! I won't be thrown out like trash!"
Toby swallowed hard. "Ma'am, there's also... the federal prosecutor. They’ve offered a plea deal. Five years in a minimum-security facility if you confess to the embezzlement."
Eleanor stopped pacing. She looked at Toby with eyes that had completely fractured from reality. Five years in a cage? Stripped of her silk, her power, her name? The very idea was acid in her veins.
"I am not going to prison," Eleanor whispered, a dark, terrifying calm washing over her. "And Clara is not going to take my son. She used my grandson as a prop. She thinks she's untouchable behind her new security."
Eleanor walked to a hidden compartment in her suitcase and pulled out a burner phone. She dialed a number she hadn't used in twenty years—a number belonging to the criminal underbelly she had used to clear the path for her husband's rise to power.
"It's Eleanor," she said into the receiver, her voice dead and hollow. "I need a team. A ghost team. No traceability."
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"Who is the target, Mrs. Hawthorne?" a gravelly voice replied.
"Not who," Eleanor smiled, a wicked, unhinged expression. "What. I want the child. I want Oliver. She thinks she broke my heart? I'm going to rip hers out of her chest."
