Chapter 4 - The Ghost of 1996The man turned around slowly in his leather chair.
He looked old—his hair completely white, his face etched with deep, weathered lines—but his eyes were piercingly sharp. He wore a dark wool sweater, and resting on the desk in front of him was an antique silver revolver.
“Well, well,” a raspy, gravelly voice broke the silence. “Evelyn always said a stray cat would eventually find the back door.”
I backed up against the heavy iron door, my hands trembling so violently the gold necklace clinked against my buttons. “Who are you? Are you one of Victor’s men?”
The old man let out a dry, hacking laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across pavement. “Victor? That pathetic excuse for a butcher hasn’t made a real decision in twenty years. He just plays the monster because he doesn't have the stomach to be a ghost.”
He stood up, leaning heavily on a carved walking cane, and limped toward me. As he stepped into the light, I noticed a jagged, pale scar running from his left temple down past his jawline—the exact mark my mother had described to me in our freezing apartment when she told me stories of the grandfather who had vanished into the night.
“You’re…” I whispered, my voice shaking. “You’re Arthur Vance? No—Arthur is upstairs, he got hit—”
“Arthur is my shadow, little one,” the old man corrected gently, stopping a few feet away so as not to frighten me. He looked down at the blue ruby necklace clutched in my fist, and a profound, bone-deep sorrow washed over his features. “And you have Sarah’s eyes. Exactly like her.”
Before I could ask another question, the security monitors on the wall flickered to life.
On screen three, the feed from the ballroom showed Evelyn Whitmore standing tall against the marble pillar, her hands cuffed behind her back by two armed mercenaries. Standing before her, stepping out of the shadows of the broken terrace, was a tall, impeccably dressed man with silver-streaked hair and a cold, predatory smile.
Victor Vance.
“Well, Evelyn,” the television audio transmitted Victor’s smooth, venomous voice straight into the vault. “You kept my grand-niece hidden away for nine years. Where is the child? Where is the key to the offshore trust?”
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The old man beside me—my grandfather, the real Victor Vance who had fumed in exile while his treacherous brother stole his name and empire—slowly reached out and picked up the heavy silver revolver from the desk.
“It’s time to end this family reunion,” he whispered, checking the cylinder with a satisfying clack.
