Chapter 5 - The Ghost of MarseillesHook“Everyone thought the heiress was dead. But the darkest secrets aren't buried underground—they're kept alive in places money can hide.”
Before heading to the Brooklyn docks for the midnight showdown, we needed leverage. And the key to that leverage lay buried inside the encrypted micro-drive we had extracted from Lily's teddy bear.
Marcus and I met with an elite black-hat hacker in an underground garage in Queens. For two agonizing hours, line after line of green code scrolled across a wall of monitors as the hacker bypassed the drive's triple-layer encryption.
"This isn't financial data, man," the hacker said, pushing his glasses up his nose in disbelief. "This is a live video log and medical dossier. Dated up to two weeks ago."
"Play it," I ordered.
The central screen flickered to life.
The video footage was grainy, taken from a hidden camera. It showed a dimly lit room inside what appeared to be a high-security medical facility. Sitting in a chair by a window was a frail, pale woman with long dark hair and striking blue eyes.
Henriette Vance-Moreau.
She wasn't dead. She had been kept hidden, drugged, and legally erased for three years.
A voice off-camera—unmistakably Julian Vance-Moreau’s—began to speak in the video.
"You refuse to sign the power of attorney, Henriette. You think your stubbornness is noble. But as long as you refuse to transfer the family trust's controlling stock to me, you will remain in this room. And your precious little daughter will rot in a state home, believing you abandoned her."
The camera zoomed in as Henriette lifted her head, looking straight toward the lens. Her voice was weak, but filled with absolute defiance.
"My daughter... knows my song. She will remember who she is... and someone will find you, Julian."
The video cut to black.
"My God," Marcus breathed. "He didn't just steal her inheritance. He kept his own daughter locked away in a private psychiatric prison to keep control of the family banking empire!"
"Where is that facility?" I demanded, my hands clenched into tight fists.
The hacker ran a geolocation trace on the video's metadata. "The IP address routes through a private medical estate in Saint-Tropez, France... but there’s a secondary local node right here in New York. A private clinic in Long Island, registered under a subsidiary of Sterling Logistics."
The entire conspiracy was exposed. Julian was keeping Henriette hidden in Long Island until he could force her to sign away the remaining assets, while using James to liquidate Sterling Logistics and bury Lily forever.
"We have two hours before the meeting in Brooklyn," Marcus said, checking his watch. "What's the play?"
"We split up," I said, a lethal calm coming over me. "You take a squad to the Long Island clinic and pull Henriette out alive. I'm taking the drive to Brooklyn to face Julian."
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"Rob, that's suicide," Marcus warned. "You walk into that dock alone, they will kill you the moment they have the drive."
"They won't," I smiled coldly. "Because they don't know I've already invited the federal prosecutor and every major news network in New York to the party."
