Chapter 3 - The Sister's Secret
Clara Vance lived in a small, brick row-house in the historic district of Victorian Village—a sharp contrast to the sprawling, gated estates favored by her parents and brothers.
At 1:30 AM, the tree-lined street was pitch black, save for the warm glow of a single lamp burning in her ground-floor window.
I parked my Accord two blocks away beneath the shadow of a large maple tree, covering my ivory dress with an oversized navy trench coat Marcus had pulled from his office closet. I walked quickly down the brick sidewalk, my heart hammering against my ribs, keeping my eyes peeled for Derek’s silver Mercedes.
When I reached her front porch, I didn't ring the bell. I tapped three times softly against the wooden door frame.
A second later, the curtain twitched. The deadbolt clicked, and the door opened six inches, kept on a brass safety chain.
Clara’s pale face appeared in the gap. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her dark hair pulled into a messy knot. When she saw me—and saw the distinct, swollen outline of her brother's handprint against my cheek—she let out a sharp, trembling breath.
"You're crazy for coming here," she whispered, looking frantically over my shoulder toward the street. "If Derek finds out you talked to me—"
"He won't," I said, keeping my voice firm. "He's currently breaking into my High Street apartment with Julian, looking for a woman he thinks is cowering under a blanket."
Clara stared at me for three seconds. Then she unhooked the brass chain and pulled the door open wide. "Get inside. Fast."
The inside of Clara’s home was cluttered with textbooks, architectural blueprints, and stacks of legal folders. She was twenty-four, a graduate student at Ohio State, and the only member of the Vance family who had refused to work for her father’s firm.
She closed and locked the door, leaning her back against the solid wood, looking at me with a mixture of awe and profound terror.
"You threw water in his face," she whispered, a faint, disbelieving smile touching her lips. "And then you hit him three times. I saw it from the hallway."
"I should have hit him four," I replied, pulling off the trench coat and throwing it over a chair. "Clara... why did you tell me to run?"
Clara walked over to her kitchen counter, her hands shaking as she poured two mugs of cold water from a pitcher. She handed one to me, her eyes fixed on the floor.
"Because you're the second one," she said quietly.
The air in the small room instantly turned to ice.
"The second what?" I asked.
"The second wife," Clara said, looking up at me with eyes full of long-buried pain. "Four years ago... before you met Derek... he was engaged to a girl named Victoria Miller. She was twenty-five, an associate architect at a firm downtown. She was smart, ambitious, and completely head-over-heels in love with him."
My fingers tightened around the cold glass mug. "Derek told me he had never been engaged before. He said I was the first woman he ever asked to marry him."
"He lied," Clara scoffed bitterly. "They had a private ceremony in Charleston. No big church wedding—just immediate family. Three weeks after the wedding, Victoria showed up at my college dorm room at two in the morning. Her jaw was bruised. Her arm was in a sling."
I felt the blood drain from my face. "What happened to her?"
"The exact same thing," Clara said, her voice dropping into a raspy whisper. "Derek tried to enforce the 'family rules.' When she fought back, my father and Julian stepped in. They told her that if she tried to leave, if she went to the police, they would use their connections in the county prosecutor's office to destroy her father's engineering business."
"Did she stay?"
"No," Clara shook her head. "Victoria was tough. She tried to fight them in court. But my father... my father had her declared financially unfit using a set of forged documents she had signed during their engagement. They drained her bank accounts, ruined her credit, and drove her father's company into bankruptcy. She left Ohio three years ago and never came back. She signed a non-disclosure agreement just to make them stop going after her family."
I stood in the center of Clara's living room, feeling a cold, calculating rage wash over me.
It was a pattern. A systematic, repeated predator playbook executed by a family of legal wolves who used marriage as an instrument of financial extortion and physical subjugation.
"Where is Victoria now?" I demanded.
"She's living in Chicago," Clara said, reaching into her desk drawer and pulling out a small, black USB flash drive. "I kept in touch with her secretly. She gave me copies of everything—the forged loan agreements, the medical reports from the ER in Charleston, the emails from my father's office threatening her family."
Clara held the flash drive out toward me, her hands trembling violently.
"I was too scared to help her four years ago, Emily," Clara said, tears spilling down her face. "I was nineteen, financially dependent on my dad, and terrified of what they would do to me. But I watched you in that kitchen tonight. You didn't cry. You didn't ask for permission. You hit him back."
I took the cold metal USB drive from her hand, wrapping my fingers around it tightly.
"Why are you giving me this, Clara?" I asked softly. "They're your family."
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Clara looked me straight in the eye, her jaw setting into a hard, unyielding line that proved she was a Vance, too—just a very different kind.
"They're monsters, Emily," Clara said clearly. "And it's time someone put them behind bars."
