Chapter 22 - The Ghost of Vance Manor
The figure emerging from the mist was not a stranger, nor was he a phantom conjured by my freezing mind. The silver-headed cane tapped rhythmically against the slick limestone pebbles of the riverbank, followed by the crisp, measured stride of bespoke leather shoes. Above the upturned collar of a cashmere trench coat, the aristocratic features of David Vance were etched in sharp relief against the dawn—features so strikingly identical to Julian’s that my chest seized with visceral terror.
He was supposed to be in a private sanatorium in Zurich, bedridden and ruined by the catastrophic collapse of his textile empire five years ago. Yet here he stood, broad-shouldered, impeccably groomed, holding an antique pearl-gripped revolver leveled with horrifying precision at his only son’s temple.
"Father?" Julian’s voice cracked, the word shattering like thin ice underfoot. He rose slowly to his feet, shielding me behind his soaked frame despite his violently shivering limbs. "You... you were comatose. The doctors—"
"The doctors in Zurich are paid six figures a quarter to tell the world precisely what I dictate, Julian," David Vance said smoothly, his tone as warm and indifferent as a mortician arranging silk flowers over a casket. "A man cannot properly oversee the liquidation of an entire century’s worth of debt if the vultures think he is still walking among them. But I see your bride has inherited her mother’s damnable habit of digging where the earth has already been consecrated."
David tilted the barrel of the weapon slightly, pointing it directly at the exposed golden weave of my corset. The Guyanese spider-silk shimmered even beneath the coating of mud and river foam, catching the faint, slate-gray light of the morning.
"Eleanor thought she was so clever," David mused, stepping closer. Behind him, two hulking men dressed in tactical black raincoats materialized from the weeping willows, their faces obscured by ballistic masks, suppressed submachine guns hanging across their chests. "She thought she could hide the master register in the core lining of a bridal gown. She honestly believed that if she married you into my family, the guilt would protect her lineage. But your sister, Clara—poor, vain, covetous Evelyn—made the extraction far simpler than I could have ever engineered."
"Evelyn didn't just steal the dress because she was jealous," I whispered, the sickening realization coalescing in my gut like lead. "You told her to take it. You promised her the family inheritance if she walked down that aisle."
David chuckled, a dry, papery sound that rattled against the damp air. "A woman who covets her sister's happiness will swallow any lie you feed her on a silver spoon. Evelyn thought she was claiming Julian and a fortune. In reality, she was merely transporting my property out of your mother’s vault under three hundred sets of admiring eyes. It’s a pity your dramatic little stunt with the projector ruined the seamless transfer."
He extended an open leather-gloved palm. "Give me the microfilm, Clara. Give it to me, and perhaps I will allow Julian to live long enough to watch the board vote me back into the chair of the Vance Syndicate."
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Julian stepped forward, his eyes blazing with a fury I had never seen in him. "You set the fire in 1996, didn't you? You didn't just buy the illegal patents—you burned the entire Montmartre atelier to ash to burn the witnesses alive! Mother... your own wife died in that hospital two months later from the smoke inhalation, and you told me it was asthma!"
David didn't flinch. His grip on the revolver remained stone-steady. "Your mother was weak, Julian. She possessed a heart of spun cotton. In this industry, if you do not weave with iron, you are strangled by the loom. Now, the film. Before I decide that one son is an acceptable casualty for an empire."
