Chapter 5 - The Dead Man's Voice
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
"Christian Vance is dead," I whispered, my grip on the brass letter opener tightening until my knuckles turned white. "He burned to death in Montauk four years ago. Julian identified the dental records."
"Julian identified what the medical examiner was paid five hundred thousand dollars to verify," the man replied, his voice laced with bitter irony. He didn't raise the weapon; instead, he engaged the safety with a practiced flick of his thumb and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers. "My mother wanted a closed-casket funeral to protect the family stock. She didn't want the world to know that her eldest son had barely escaped a car bomb planted by her beloved daughter."
He stepped closer to the light. In the amber glow of the desk lamp, the illusion of his youth vanished. The skin on the right side of his neck was a patchwork of grafted tissue. His right ear was partially missing, reconstructed poorly. The handsome, golden prince from the society pages had been replaced by a ghost cobbled together with surgical steel and scar tissue.
"You're alive," I breathed, the sheer impossibility of the situation hitting me like a physical blow.
"Barely," Christian said, leaning against the bedpost with a soft grunt of pain. "I’ve been living in Lisbon, then Montreal, under three different identities. Waiting for the right time to expose Victoria's financial bleed of the family trusts. But when I saw the society pages announcing Julian’s engagement to a girl named Clara... I knew Victoria’s clock was ticking."
"What does this have to do with me?!" I demanded, stepping forward, my fear giving way to indignant rage. "She threw me down the church steps! She tried to break my neck! She told Julian I was your mistress, that I stole two million dollars from you!"
Christian looked at me with deep, sorrowful eyes. "She didn't target you because of who you are, Clara. She targeted you because of your father."
The air left my chest. "My father? David Hayes? He was a mid-level contractor in Chicago. He died of a heart attack four years ago after his firm went bankrupt!"
"David Hayes didn't have a heart attack," Christian said coldly. "And his firm didn't go bankrupt by accident. Your father was the primary structural engineer on the Vance Harbor development in Boston—a three-hundred-million-dollar maritime terminal. He discovered that Victoria had siphoned eighty million dollars from the concrete and steel procurement fund, replacing the structural materials with substandard, dangerous alloys."
I stared at him, paralyzed. My mind raced back four years—to the sudden, frantic phone calls my father had made in the dead of night, the panic in his eyes, the way he had insisted my mother and I change our locks. And then, his sudden death at his office desk, ruled a stress-induced coronary.
"Your father went to the federal authorities," Christian continued, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "He reached out to me directly because I was running the shipping operations. We were supposed to meet in Montauk on October 14th. He was bringing the digital ledger proving Victoria's embezzlement. But Victoria intercepted his courier. She had your father silenced, made it look like natural heart failure, and that same night, my car's steering column locked at eighty miles an hour on the Montauk highway."
Tears, hot and furious, spilled down my cheeks. My father wasn't an unlucky businessman who had failed. He was a whistleblower murdered by the Vance dynasty.
"Why me?" I choked out. "Why Julian?"
"Because your father left the backup files in a place Victoria couldn't touch," Christian explained, his eyes locking onto the pocket of my robe. "He hid the encrypted ledger inside a trust account registered under an old maritime shell company—*Mercer Logistics*. He set the inheritance protocol to trigger only upon your legal marriage into a tier-one family, believing that the public scrutiny of high society would protect you from being quietly eliminated."
The silver key in my pocket suddenly felt as heavy as a lead weight.
"Victoria found out Julian was dating you eighteen months ago," Christian said. "She couldn't kill you then, because the trust would default to federal probate, and the embezzlement evidence would automatically be delivered to the Department of Justice. She had to let the marriage happen. But she needed Julian to disown you the second the ceremony ended, before you could sign the post-nuptial access agreements."
"She kicked me down the stairs to kill me," I realized with a shudder. "A tragic accident on the wedding day. The bride dies, the trust dissolves to the next of kin—which would be Julian—and Victoria controls Julian."
"Precisely," Christian said. "Julian is brilliant with design, but he is blind when it comes to family loyalty. He loves Victoria. He protected her when we were kids. He would never suspect she is a psychopath capable of fratricide."
Suddenly, the floorboards in the corridor outside creaked.
Christian moved with terrifying speed. In a heartbeat, his gun was back in his hand. He stepped behind the heavy velvet window drapes, melting into the shadows like smoke.
The heavy brass handle of the bedroom door turned.
The door swung open, and Julian stood in the entryway.
He was soaking wet, his hair plastered to his forehead, his tuxedo shirt torn and stained with grease. His eyes were wild, bloodshot, and filled with a dangerous mixture of grief, exhaustion, and confusion.
"Clara," Julian said, his voice trembling. He took two unsteady steps into the room, holding up a manila folder. "I went to the city. I broke into Victoria’s penthouse safe."
He stopped, his eyes falling on the torn velvet drapery near the window. He frowned, his senses instantly alerting him that something was wrong.
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"Who's in here with you?" Julian whispered, his hand instinctively reaching toward the desk where a heavy brass lamp sat. "Clara... step away from the window."
***
