Chapter 2 - The Portrait's SecretThe cool marble of the private east gallery felt chilling beneath my fingertips. The pale moonlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated The Blue Woman, the haunting masterpiece my mother had painted just weeks before her tragic death.
My husband, Chidi Nwosu, stood silent near the doorway, his tall frame leaning slightly on his sleek obsidian cane. Though blind from the rigged car crash that had nearly ended his life three years ago, his other senses were razor-sharp. He could track the subtle change in my breathing, the faint tremor in my hands.
“You found it,” Chidi said quietly, his rich, baritone voice cutting through the stillness.
“I found it,” I whispered back, my eyes locked on the charcoal inscription hidden beneath the cracked wooden frame: HE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE.
“What does it say, Adaeze?” Chidi asked, taking two measured steps closer.
I swallowed hard, the taste of copper and panic rising in my throat. Fifteen years ago, a terrified little girl had pulled a dying man from a burning wreckage on a dark highway outside Enugu. That man was Chidi. And my mother—an elite art restorer who had worked for the top private estates in Nigeria—had somehow discovered that Chidi's crash wasn't an accident. It was a calculated assassination attempt orchestrated from within his own inner circle.
May you like
And my stepsister Adaeze’s father, Chief Eze, was the primary architect of the plot.
“It says your accident wasn't bad luck, Chidi,” I turned to face him, my voice trembling with suppressed fury. “It was murder. And the people who tried to kill you are sitting in my father’s house right now.”
