Chapter 2 - THE SECRETS OF THE DEAD
The sound of the handcuffs clicking around Marissa’s wrists was the most beautiful music I had heard in three years. She screamed, thrashing like a wild animal as the officers dragged her toward the door.
"You can't do this! I have rights! I am a Whitcomb!" she shrieked, her voice echoing down the sterile hallway of the private hospice wing.
"Not anymore," Harrison Vance murmured, adjusting his glasses as the heavy door slammed shut behind her.
The room fell into an eerie, heavy silence, broken only by the rhythmic hum of Arthur’s oxygen machine. I stood up completely, walking over to Arthur’s bed. I took his hand—the hand Marissa had claimed was curled like paper—and squeezed it.
Arthur pulled off his own mask, a deep sigh of relief escaping his lips. "God, Eleanor, another thirty seconds and she actually would have suffocated me. You always did love a dramatic entrance."
"You played your part beautifully, darling," I replied, smoothing the blankets over his chest. "The frantic heart monitor was a masterpiece of method acting."
"It wasn't all acting," Arthur muttered, though a smirk played at the corner of his mouth. "The woman has the grip of a iron vice."
Harrison Vance closed his tablet and stepped forward, his expression switching from professional coldness to deep concern. "The trap worked flawlessly, Eleanor. The police have already detained the night nurse and the security guard she bribed. They’re singing like birds to avoid conspiracy to murder charges. But we have a major problem."
I narrowed my eyes. "The forged deeds?"
"Worse," Vance said, dropping a thick leather folder onto the bedside table. "When Marissa unlocked your phone, our system didn't just record her. It traced the IP address of the offshore server she was using to prepare the transfer of the Whitcomb Foundation's liquid assets. She wasn't acting alone. A standard gold-digger doesn't have access to military-grade encryption or deep-tier shell companies in the Cayman Islands."
I felt a cold knot form in my stomach. "Daniel's debts. I thought they were liquidated after his crash."
"We thought so too," Vance said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "But look at the transaction logs. Someone has been funneling money out of Daniel’s old tech firm for the last six months. Eleanor... Daniel’s death wasn't an accident. And Marissa wasn't trying to inherit the empire for herself. She was trying to pay off a debt to someone who makes her look like a saint."
I opened the folder. Page after page of financial statements blurred before my eyes until I saw a single, recurring signature on the authorization forms. A signature that should have been buried six feet under.
It was Daniel’s handwriting. The ink was dated less than three weeks ago.
"My god," Arthur whispered, leaning over to look at the papers. "Daniel is alive?"
"No," I said, my fingers gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles turned white. "Daniel is dead. I buried him myself. I identified the body. But someone is using his ghost to hollow out our family from the inside out."
Suddenly, the lights in the hospice room flickered. The steady hum of the backup generators kicked in, but the medical monitors remained dead. Outside, in the hallway, a long, high-pitched alarm began to blare.
The electronic lock on our door clicked.
"Vance," I said quietly, reaching into the bedside drawer and pulling out a small, sleek silver revolver I had smuggled into the room weeks ago. "Tell me the police didn't leave the building yet."
Vance checked his phone. "Signal's dead. Total cellular blackout."
The door to our room slowly swung open. But it wasn't Marissa, and it wasn't the police. It was a tall man wearing a doctor’s white coat, his face obscured by a surgical mask and a low-brimmed cap.
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In his hand, he held a silenced pistol.
"Eleanor Whitcomb," the man said, his voice smooth, cultured, and terrifyingly familiar. "You really should have just died in your sleep."
