Chapter 2 - The Secret Ledger of Vance NutritionTwo hours later, Elliot sat in the cramped, damp office of Somerset House, the smell of cheap instant coffee hanging heavy in the air. Across the desk sat Margaret Hollis, shifting nervously through a thick, yellowed folder of intake records.
"I'm telling you, Mr. Vance, there's no mystery left to uncover regarding Lily's admission," Margaret said, pushing her glasses up her nose. "She was dropped off on November 14th during the midnight shift change. No note, no identification, just a wicker basket and that doll. The police investigated, but with no cameras and a blizzard wiping out footprints, the trail went stone cold."
Elliot didn't blink. His mind was racing at corporate-takeover speed, calculating variables, tracing supply chains of human trafficking, adoption irregularities, and underground child-placement rings.
"Run a DNA test," Elliot ordered, his voice dropping an octave into absolute authority.
Margaret blinked, taken aback. "Mr. Vance, you can't just—DNA matching requires court orders, ancestry databases, and—"
"I don't care about court orders," Elliot interrupted, pulling a sleek black card from his pocket and slamming it onto the scratched wooden desk. "Call my private legal counsel, Marcus Sterling. Tell him to mobilize a full forensic team, a private investigative unit, and a court magistrate within the hour. Spare no expense. If that girl is carrying my family's blood, I will turn this state upside down to find out who put her here."
What Margaret didn't know—what the entire world didn't know—was that Vance Nutrition was built on a lie.
Publicly, Elliot was hailed as a self-made prodigy who clawed his way out of the slums through pure grit. But the truth was darker. The initial seed capital for Vance Nutrition didn't come from a venture capitalist or a bank loan. It came from a high-stakes corporate blackmail settlement involving the disappearance of his biological family's estate decades ago—an estate stolen by a ruthless corporate raider named Richard Sterling: Marcus’s father.
As Elliot stared out the rain-streaked window, his phone buzzed. It was a text from his chief of security, Viktor:
Boss, we ran the facial recognition and textile analysis on the doll's stitching. The thread isn't modern. It's an exact chemical match to a vintage textile mill that went bankrupt in 1994... owned by your uncle, Arthur Vance.
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Elliot’s blood ran cold. Arthur Vance hadn't just been a distant relative; he was the man who had legally adopted—and subsequently locked away—Elliot's younger sister, Maisie, right after their parents died.
And Arthur Vance's primary corporate partner back then? None other than Richard Sterling.
