Chapter 4 - The Shattered Ledger
By three o'clock in the morning, the Vance Manor had become an operations center.
Duncan did not sleep. He sat in his cavernous ground-floor study, surrounded by stacks of financial records, personnel files from five years prior, and a glowing laptop screen displaying the encrypted database of Vance Maritime Logistics.
Sitting across from him was Silas Vance, his younger cousin and the chief legal counsel for the family firm. Silas was disheveled, having been dragged out of bed two hours earlier, but his sharp blue eyes were razor-focused.
"This is bad, Duncan," Silas said, sliding a thick manila folder across the mahogany desk. "Felice wasn't bluffing about her father. Judge Arthur Lancaster doesn't just hold influence; he sits on the regulatory board that approves your deep-water shipping licenses. If he pulls the safety certifications, half your fleet is docked by Friday. That’s a forty-million-dollar loss per week."
Duncan didn't blink. "I don't give a damn about the fleet."
Silas stared at him in disbelief. "You don't give a damn? Duncan, you’ve bled for this company for a decade. You nearly died in that car in Switzerland trying to secure the European routes!"
"And who was in the car with me, Silas?" Duncan asked, his voice dead flat.
Silas hesitated. "The police report said you were alone. You hit a patch of black ice coming down from the resort in St. Moritz."
"Look at the hospital intake logs," Duncan commanded, pointing at the laptop screen. "The ones Felice’s father had sealed under Swiss privacy laws. My security team breached their local server twenty minutes ago."
Silas leaned forward, scanning the digitized documents. His eyes widened as he scrolled down. "Two patients admitted from the crash site. Duncan Vance... and an unidentified female, twenty-two weeks pregnant."
"Anwen," Duncan whispered, his hands curling into fists against the desk. "She was in the passenger seat. She took the brunt of the impact when the guardrail gave way."
Silas looked up, visibly shaken. "Duncan... the Lancaster family... they told the board you were single. They told everyone you and Felice had been engaged for months before the accident."
"It was an engineered reality," Duncan said, the horror of the truth finally crystallizing in his mind. "I woke up with retro-anterograde amnesia. I didn't know who I was, let alone who I loved. Felice was at my bedside with her father’s influence, presenting forged engagement photos, rewriting my life. And Anwen..."
His voice hitched, a rare crack in his impenetrable armor.
"They told Anwen that I survived unharmed, but that I blamed her for the crash. They told her I had signed an order to take the baby the moment it was born and put it up for closed adoption. She was terrified, penniless, recovering from multiple fractures... so she fled. And when she ran out of money to treat Leo’s chronic lung damage—damage caused by the crash—she came back to the only place she knew, desperate enough to take a maid’s job just to be near enough to beg for scraps."
"And Felice found her," Silas concluded, the revulsion evident in his tone. "Felice found her and turned her into a hostage. If Anwen spoke, Felice threatened to call child protective services using her father’s judicial pull to declare Anwen unfit."
Duncan stood up, walking toward the grand floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the misty grounds. Dawn was beginning to bleed gray across the horizon.
"Where is the swab?" Duncan asked.
Silas opened his briefcase and pulled out a sealed sterile envelope containing two cotton swabs. "I took the buccal cells from the boy’s cheek while he was sleeping, like you asked. And I have yours. I’m having my private courier drive them directly to Genex Diagnostics in the city. No third parties. No Lancaster interference."
"How long?"
"Twelve hours for a rushed genomic sequence."
"Make it six," Duncan said. "Pay whatever it takes."
Before Silas could respond, the study door flew open.
It was Anwen. She was still wearing the maid's skirt, but she had abandoned the apron. Her hair was pulled back, her face pale, her hazel eyes wide with pure, breathless terror.
May you like
"Duncan," she gasped, using his first name without thinking. "Leo... he’s gone."
***