Chapter 5: The Deposition
Chapter 5: The Deposition
Two months later, I returned to the United States. I didn't hide, and I didn't cower. I walked into the towering federal courthouse in downtown Dallas wearing a sharp, tailored white suit. The physical scars on my back were healing, but my posture had never been straighter.
The deposition room was cold and sterile. When Adrian was brought in, shackled at the wrists and wearing a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, he stopped dead in his tracks. The tailored suits, the arrogant smirk, the aggressive posture—it was all gone. He looked ten years older, his face gaunt and his eyes completely hollow.
He sat across the heavy wooden table from me. For a long moment, the room was silent except for the frantic scratching of the stenographer's machine.
"Evelyn," he whispered, his voice trembling. "Please. They're talking about twenty years. You have to tell them... tell them we had an arrangement. Tell them it went too far, but it wasn't..."
"Wasn't what, Adrian?" I interrupted, my voice as cold as ice. "Wasn't attempted murder? Wasn't a coordinated effort to torture me while you drained millions into a shell company?"
I slid a printed transcript of the audio recording across the table.
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"You hit me two hundred times, Adrian. And I only had to make one phone call. I warned you once that my father was an accountant. I just never specified that he audited the morality of men like you."
Adrian buried his face in his shackled hands, his shoulders shaking with quiet, pathetic sobs. There was no pity left in me. He wasn't crying because he was sorry; he was crying because he had been caught.
