Chapter 2 - The Girl Who Was Supposed to Be Dead“Anna?”
My voice broke on her name.
I ran toward the stairs, but Vincent caught my wrist and pulled me behind a marble pillar just as gunfire erupted from the upper corridor.
Two of his guards returned fire.
Someone shouted an order.
The emergency lights flickered on, painting the hallway red.
Vincent moved with terrifying speed. He pushed me behind him, drew a pistol from beneath his jacket, and signaled for the guards to follow him toward the west wing.
I heard the child scream again.
“Emily!”
It was unmistakably Anna.
Eleven years earlier, my little sister had vanished during a winter storm. She had been seven. Our father said she had wandered into the woods near our grandmother's house and fallen through the ice.
The police searched for three days.
They found a red scarf caught between rocks beside a frozen stream.
They never found her body.
My father buried an empty coffin, collected insurance money, and refused to speak about her again.
For years, I had nightmares about Anna knocking on a door from the other side.
Now someone was calling my name from Vincent Moretti's mansion.
I broke free.
Vincent turned just as I sprinted upstairs.
He followed me, shouting silently through gestures for me to stop.
At the top of the staircase, I saw a small figure standing near the linen closet.
A girl in a pale blue nightdress.
Her dark hair hung over her face.
She looked about eighteen now, perhaps nineteen, but the way she held her hands against her chest was exactly how Anna used to stand whenever our father came home drunk.
I took one step toward her.
“Anna?”
The girl lifted her head.
Her face was thinner than I remembered. A faint scar crossed her left eyebrow, and a pale surgical mark curved behind her right ear.
But her eyes were the same.
She began crying without making a sound.
I ran to her.
She threw her arms around me so tightly that my ribs hurt.
“You're alive,” I whispered. “You're alive.”
She shook her head against my shoulder, then pulled away and frantically searched the hallway.
Her gaze landed on Vincent.
The terror that crossed her face made my blood run cold.
She grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the linen closet.
Inside, beneath stacks of folded sheets, someone had cut a hole through the back panel. A narrow maintenance passage ran beyond it.
Anna pointed into the darkness.
Then she held up three fingers.
Three men.
I looked toward Vincent.
He had reached us, his pistol raised. When he saw Anna's face, every trace of confusion vanished.
He recognized her.
That realization struck harder than the gunshots.
“You know her,” I typed into my phone, thrusting it toward him.
Vincent didn't answer.
Anna reached for my phone herself.
Her fingers trembled so badly that it took her several attempts to type a sentence.
THEY PUT IT IN YOU TOO.
I stared at the words.
“What?”
She touched the scar behind her ear.
Then she pointed toward the study downstairs.
The metal case.
The black device.
My husband had carried it for twenty-six years, and my supposedly dead sister had a matching surgical scar.
Before I could question her, Vincent caught Anna by the shoulders and examined her face carefully. He signed something.
She shook her head.
He signed again, more urgently.
Anna began to cry harder.
Finally, she typed on my phone.
HE DOESN'T KNOW WHO HE'S PROTECTING.
The corridor door slammed open.
Daniel appeared with a gun in his hand.
Behind him stood two men I had never seen before.
Daniel looked at Vincent and spoke, slowly and deliberately, so my husband could read his lips.
“Give us the object.”
Vincent raised his pistol.
Daniel smiled.
“Don't bother pretending you can hear me, boss. I know exactly what they did to you.”
My husband went absolutely still.
Daniel continued speaking.
“Your father told us you'd eventually find out. He also told us the girl would recognize the device the moment it came out.”
His gaze shifted to me.
“Hello, Emily.”
I had never met Daniel before the day I arrived at the mansion.
Yet he knew my name.
He knew about Anna.
He knew about the device.
Vincent fired first.
The gunshot struck the wall as Daniel ducked into the passage. The two men behind him returned fire, forcing Vincent and me down behind the linen cabinets.
Anna screamed soundlessly, covering her ears.
Vincent seized a fallen lamp and hurled it through the emergency glass panel beside the stairwell.
An alarm began shrieking.
The guards appeared at the far end of the corridor.
Daniel retreated, dragging one injured accomplice through the maintenance passage.
Before he disappeared, he looked directly at me.
His lips formed a sentence.
I understood every word.
YOUR FATHER IS COMING.
Then the passage door slammed shut.
Minutes later, we were in Vincent's underground safe room.
Anna sat wrapped in a blanket while a doctor examined her scar. Vincent paced before the monitors, his movements increasingly unsteady.
I approached him.
“Tell me the truth.”
He stopped.
“Did you know my sister was alive?”
He shook his head.
“Did you know about the scar behind her ear?”
Another shake.
“Then why did she look at you like you were the man who tortured her?”
Vincent reached for my phone.
He typed slowly.
“My father built this empire. Before he died, he told me never to trust anyone who knew what happened in the basement of St. Catherine's Hospital.”
I stared at him.
“Your father is dead?”
Vincent nodded.
Then Anna rose from the couch.
She walked toward the safe room's locked storage cabinet and placed her palm against its fingerprint scanner.
The door opened.
Inside sat a stack of medical files, dozens of photographs, and a leather notebook marked with a familiar name.
My father's.
Anna opened it to the last page.
A handwritten sentence ran across the paper.
THE MORETTI BOY MUST NEVER HEAR THE TRUTH.
Below it was a date.
The date of our wedding.
My father's signature appeared underneath.
I looked at Vincent.
Then at Anna.
May you like
My father had planned this marriage long before he handed me over for fifty dollars.
And according to his own handwriting, my wedding had been the final step in a twenty-six-year conspiracy.
Related Stories
