Chapter 4 - What Lies Beneath
The hair took three hours to strip away.
By noon, the marble floor around Wren's chair looked like a battlefield of dark, heavy wool and accumulated city dust. Three heavy trash bags were filled and hauled away by silent assistants. When the final layer of grime was washed away with warm water and lavender-scented soap, the water ran dark brown for forty minutes before finally turning clear.
Théo wrapped her head in a plush white towel and stepped back, catch his breath.
"Mr. Kane," Théo whispered, pulling his mask down around his neck. "You need to see this."
Adrian walked over, his heavy boots silent on the wet floor.
Théo gently lifted the wet hair away from the back of Wren's neck, just beneath the crown of her skull. There, revealed under the warm lights of Fifth Avenue, was a distinct, silver-white birthmark in the exact shape of a crescent moon, right beside a jagged three-inch surgical scar.
Adrian's breath hitched in his chest. He stopped breathing entirely.
Ten years ago, the Vance empire—one of Manhattan's oldest, wealthiest shipping families—had burned to the ground in a catastrophic mansion fire in Greenwich, Connecticut. The patriarch, Julian Vance, had perished in the flames alongside his wife. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Evangeline, had vanished without a trace. Her body was never recovered, but the police had declared her dead after finding her blood on the marble foyer.
The Vance fortune, worth nearly two billion dollars in real estate and international shipping lines, had been locked in a bitter legal probate ever since, controlled by Julian's ruthless stepbrother, Victor Vance.
And Adrian Kane had spent two years of his youth searching every dark alley in the tri-state area for Julian Vance's lost daughter because Julian had been the only man in New York who had ever shown Adrian mercy when he was an orphan on the streets.
Adrian reached out with a hand that rarely shook and gently pushed a strand of damp, golden-brown hair away from her temple.
Without the soot, without the mud, without the suffocating cloak of filth, the face looking back at him in the grand salon mirror was undeniable.
High, sharp cheekbones. A delicate, straight nose. And those unmistakable, piercing ice-blue eyes that belonged to the Vance bloodline.
"Evangeline," Adrian whispered softly.
Wren's eyes flew open in the mirror. She froze, her entire body locking up in sheer terror.
"Don't call me that!" she gasped, scrambling backward in the leather chair, knocking a tray of metal combs to the floor with a loud clatter. "How do you know that name?! Who told you?!"
"Nobody told me," Adrian said, stepping between her and the panicked salon staff, raising his hands in a gesture of absolute peace. "I knew your father, Evangeline. I worked for Julian when I was twenty-one."
Evangeline stared at him, her chest heaving under the clean white salon cape. "My father is dead! They killed him! They set the house on fire!"
"I know," Adrian said gently, his voice dropping into a deep, steady register that anchored the chaotic room. "I was there that night, Evangeline. I tried to pull your mother out. I found your father's signet ring in the ashes."
Tears finally welled in Evangeline's blue eyes, spilling over her clean, pale cheeks—not tears of a feral street survivor, but the long-delayed tears of a terrified girl who had been running in the dark for ten agonizing years.
"Victor did it," she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. "Uncle Victor set the fire. He hired men to break in. I saw him standing in the hallway while the house burned. I hid under the porch in the dirt for three days until the fire trucks left, and then I just kept walking... I didn't stop walking for ten years..."
May you like
Marco stepped into the salon from the street, his phone held tight to his ear. His face was deadly pale.
"Boss," Marco said, his voice tight with emergency protocol. "We have a problem. Two blacked-out Suburbans just pulled up across the street. Victor Vance's security team is stepping out."
