The Mercenary Queen Strikes Back novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Birthday
The prison clock struck twelve, and Astrid Swinton turned twenty-four in the corridor outside her own cell.
Nobody said anything for the first stroke.
Marguerite took Astrid's face in both hands.
"Happy birthday," she said.
"I've never had one."
"You have had twenty-three of them. I lit a candle on every one."
Astrid stood very still.
Nobody had ever said anything to her about a birthday.
She did not know what she was supposed to do with it.
"You lit a candle?"
"Every year," Marguerite said. "In the kitchen, after Everard went to bed, so he wouldn't ask. I told myself it was for a daughter who had died."
She was crying openly now.
"It was for you."
Astrid put her arms around her mother and held on.
Behind her, Duncan took off his hat and pretended to look at the ceiling.
Vaughn stood at the end of the corridor with a new silver star on his jacket.
He watched the two of them and did not hide his face.
Over the sea, the last stroke faded.
The trust was hers.
The Swinton board met at nine the next morning, in the long glass boardroom on the fifty-ninth floor of Swinton Tower.
Twelve directors in dark suits sat around the table, and not one of them looked at the doors.
Every one of them had watched the ballroom recording more than once.
At the head of the table sat the trust lawyer, a thin man with a ledger.
For the first time in forty years, no Swinton sat in the chairman's seat.
"By the terms of the trust," the lawyer said, "upon the twenty-fourth birthday of the firstborn child of Everard and Marguerite Swinton, the entire estate passes to that child."
"Miss Astrid Swinton was born on the day recorded in the hospital register, which the family sealed."
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