Chapter 2 - The Echo of the HighwayThe heavy mahogany door of the east gallery closed softly behind me, but the silence inside did not comfort me. It pressed down like lead.
He was not supposed to survive.
The charcoal words beneath my mother's final painting burned behind my eyelids. Fifteen years ago, on a desolate, rain-slicked stretch of highway outside Enugu, a roaring inferno had swallowed a black luxury sedan. I had been sixteen then, walking home from a community art workshop, when I heard the shattering of metal. I had run toward the flames, pulled a bleeding, unconscious man from the driver's seat just seconds before the fuel tank exploded.
I never knew his name. I only remembered the heavy gold signet ring on his finger and the stark, silent terror of knowing someone wanted him dead.
Now, standing in the palatial estate of Chidi Nwosu—the very man I had dragged from that wreck, the billionaire heir who had lost his sight in the crash—the scattered fragments of my past locked into a terrifying mosaic.
My mother, an elite art restorer, had been hired by Chief Eze—my own uncle—to clean a private art collection weeks before the accident. She had stumbled upon the financial ledgers and wire transfer receipts proving that Chief Eze had paid a mechanic to sabotage Chidi’s brakes. She had tried to run. They had murdered her, staged it as an illness, and looted our home, stealing The Blue Woman because it contained the hidden blueprint of the conspiracy.
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And now, my father and stepmother had traded me off to Chidi, thinking they were dumping an unwanted burden into a blind man’s cage.
Instead, they had handed the executioner his sword.
