Chapter 2 - Shadows of the Past
Elliot sat in his bulletproof town car, the tinted windows shielding him from the relentless gray drizzle of the city. His driver, Thomas, kept his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, tracking Elliot’s pale expression. Thomas had worked for the Vance family for twenty years; he knew the contours of Elliot’s silences, but he had never seen his employer look as though he had seen a ghost.
"Sir, should I drive straight to the tower?" Thomas asked softly.
"No," Elliot rasped, staring down at his own hands, which were still trembling slightly. "Park by the river. Give me ten minutes."
The car glided toward the embankment, overlooking the swollen, churning gray waters of the Hudson. Elliot closed his eyes, and the dam he had built around his childhood broke.
Thirty-one years ago, he was eleven, and Maisie was seven.
He remembered the bitter winter of their childhood, the biting wind that whistled through the floorboards of their old house before their father’s business empire rose from the ashes of bankruptcy. They had very little back then—only each other. Elliot had carved a clumsy wooden body for a rag doll, and Maisie had stolen scraps of an old pink dress from their mother’s sewing basket to clothe it. Together, they had stitched the name Maisie onto its belly because, as little Maisie had declared with solemn innocence, "Every doll needs to know who loves her so she doesn't get lost in the dark."
Then came the night of the fire. Or rather, the night the house was broken into, the night chaos descended, and Maisie vanished from her bed. The police found no trace, only a trail of footprints leading into the freezing woods. The investigation grew cold, swallowed by bureaucracy and the family’s frantic, desperate pivot into ruthless ambition. His parents had buried their grief under millions of dollars, working themselves into early graves, leaving Elliot alone to inherit a cold kingdom.
And now, a four-year-old girl in a rundown municipal orphanage was holding that exact doll.
The math didn't add up. The timeline was impossible. Maisie would be thirty-eight now.
Unless... Laya wasn’t his sister. Unless Laya was something else entirely.
May you like
Elliot opened his eyes, his gaze hardening with a sudden, fierce resolve. He picked up his secure corporate phone and dialed his most trusted head of security, Marcus Vance—no relation, but a man who could find the history of a ghost if paid enough.
"Marcus," Elliot said, his voice cold and steady. "I need you to pull every available record on a woman named Margot Liry who passed away six months ago at St. Jude’s Hospice. I want her birth certificate, her medical history, her financial footprint, and every address she lived at for the last thirty years. I want it on my desk by morning."
