Chapter 146 - The Concrete Arteries
The entrance to the railway culvert was a jagged arch of reinforced concrete half-choked with dangling icicles and dead reeds. Inside, the air was warmer than the gale outside, but it smelled of damp stone, rust, and decades of decayed leaves.
Arthur clicked on his red penlight, keeping the beam pointed strictly at the ground. Water sloshed around their boots, two inches deep and cold as liquid glass.
"Where does this lead?" Emma asked, her arms aching from carrying Maya’s weight, though she refused to set her daughter down in the freezing mire.
"Three miles west to an old junction switch-house," Arthur said, moving with surprising speed despite his limp. "The Canadian Pacific Railway abandoned it in the nineties, but the underground utility conduits still run to the grain elevators in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. There’s an emergency telephone line there that doesn't route through modern digital exchanges."
"You want to call Zurich?"
"I want to call the one man who hates Victor Sterling more than Eleanor ever did," Arthur replied, his voice echoing off the curved stone walls. "Eleanor's estranged younger brother. The one who walked away from the Vance estate in 1985 and was declared legally dead."
Emma stopped dead in the murky water, her breath catching. "Julian? Uncle Julian is alive?"
Arthur turned back, his expression grim under the faint red light. "Julian didn't die in that boating accident on Lake Lucerne, Emma. Eleanor tried to have him eliminated because he refused to sign over his share of the Geneva trust to Sterling. I helped him disappear. I gave him a new name, a new passport, and a farm forty miles outside Montreal."
Emma felt a surge of dizzying disbelief. The web of lies her mother had spun around their family wasn't just a pattern of emotional abuse—it was a sprawling criminal enterprise designed to sacrifice everyone, one by one, to satisfy a monstrous financial phantom.
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"Why didn't you tell me?" Emma demanded, her voice shaking with righteous fury. "When I was growing up, crying myself to sleep because Eleanor said I was worthless, why didn't you tell me there were people who escaped her?"
"Because if you knew, you would have looked for him," Arthur said quietly. "And if you looked for him, Eleanor would have followed you. She would have killed you both."
