Chapter 22 - The Ghost Scribe
By midnight, the local authorities—personally vetted and overseen by federal marshals loyal to my father's memory—had cordoned off the coastal perimeter. Three black body bags were wheeled out through the shattered terrace.
Rosalie sat at the kitchen island, a strip of sterile gauze wrapped around a minor graze on her forearm where flying glass had nicked her. She didn’t look at the blood. Her gaze was locked onto Catherine Vance’s handwritten files, which we had extracted from the burned-out safe in Catherine’s estate months ago—files we thought were fully decoded until tonight.
"How could she hide a daughter from me for twenty-eight years?" Rosalie’s voice cracked slightly, the emotional strain finally piercing through her stoic armor. "I grew up an only child. Catherine controlled every breath I took, every school I attended, every dollar I inherited. How could there be an older sister?"
I pulled up a secure military intelligence database on my ruggedized laptop, plugging in a heavily encrypted USB key that Bishop had pulled from the tactical radio of the lead assassin at Arlington.
"Because Victoria wasn't raised to be an heir, Rose," I said, scanning the cascading lines of de-anonymized data. "She was raised to be an operative."
The screen blinked green. A personnel file flashed open, stamped with top-secret classifications from five different intelligence agencies across Europe and North America.
A photograph loaded line by line.
The woman on the screen shared Rosalie’s high cheekbones and striking jawline, but her eyes held none of Rosalie’s warmth. Victoria Vance had cold, slate-gray irises, devoid of empathy. Beneath her profile lay an alias history spanning twelve countries: *The Architect of the Obsidian Cadre.*
"Victoria was Catherine's child from an affair before she married your father," I explained, scrolling through the horrifying timeline. "When Victoria showed sociopathic tendencies at age twelve, Catherine didn't institutionalize her. She sent her to an elite private mercenary academy in Switzerland funded by Victor Kane’s black-money network. She kept Victoria off the Vance books entirely."
"A ghost," Rosalie whispered, touching the screen where her sister's face loomed. "A shadow sister built to inherit the underworld while I was groomed to be the legitimate public face."
"And when I took down Catherine and dismantled Kane's empire," I said grimly, "Victoria inherited the remnants. She doesn't just want vengeance for her mother. She wants the two billion dollars in Vance trust funds currently legally locked under your sole name."
The laptop screen suddenly glitched, lines of code dissolving into static.
A digital avatar appeared: the coiled serpent of the Obsidian Cadre.
*“Clever boy, Alexander,”* Victoria’s synthetic voice purred through the laptop speakers. *“You figured out the family tree. But while you’re staring at my childhood dossier, my private equity firms just seized the controlling interest of Sinclair Logistics in Boston. By tomorrow morning, every supply chain bearing your father’s name will belong to me. Come find me in the city... if your little broken doll can survive the night.”*
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Rosalie leaned over my shoulder, pressing the audio override button before I could stop her.
"Listen to me, Victoria," Rosalie said, her voice dropping into an icy register that sounded terrifyingly like her mother’s, yet tempered with righteous steel. "You called me broken. But when you break steel, you can forge a blade. I’m coming for my name, my father's honor, and every cent you stole. Don’t run."
