CHAPTER 2 — The Missing Sister
Guests screamed and dropped to the floor.
Emily felt someone grab her arm.
For one terrible second, she thought it was Victor.
Then Elena’s voice reached her through the darkness.
“Stay low.”
Emergency lights flickered on.
Victor was gone.
Thomas lay beside the staircase, blood spreading across the shoulder of his white shirt. The front doors stood open, and rain blew across the marble floor.
The police arrived seconds later.
They searched the grounds, the garages, the guesthouse, and the forest behind the estate.
Victor had disappeared.
Thomas was rushed to the hospital. His injury was serious but not fatal.
Emily refused medical treatment until a detective confirmed the mansion was secure.
Then she turned toward Elena.
“Tell me everything.”
They sat in Emily’s private library while police officers moved through the hallways.
Elena opened the locket.
Inside was a faded photograph of Emily’s mother holding two infant girls.
One baby wore a pink bracelet.
The other wore blue.
Emily recognized the photograph immediately. She had seen a damaged version in her mother’s belongings, but half of it had been torn away.
“Our mother gave birth to twins,” Elena said. “You were kept. I was taken.”
“Taken by whom?”
“I never knew.”
Elena explained that she had grown up in foster homes under another name. At seventeen, she received a letter from a woman claiming to have known her birth mother.
The letter contained the locket and one sentence:
Your family did not abandon you. Someone powerful made sure you disappeared.
For years, Elena searched for answers.
Her search eventually led her to the Carter mansion.
“You knew I was your sister when you came here?” Emily asked.
“I suspected it.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I needed proof. Victor watched everything you did. He read your messages. He checked your phone while you slept. I was afraid that if I told you too soon, he would hurt both of us.”
Emily instinctively touched her stomach.
“Why would Victor care that I had a sister?”
Elena looked toward the library door.
“Because your father’s estate was never meant to belong to you alone.”
She removed a folded document from inside her apron.
It was a copy of an old trust agreement.
According to the document, control of the Whitmore fortune would pass equally to both surviving daughters when the youngest daughter turned thirty.
Emily had turned thirty the previous week.
“If we’re both alive,” Elena said, “Victor gets nothing.”
Emily studied the document.
A handwritten note appeared at the bottom.
It was signed by her father three days before his death.
Find my first daughter before Victor finds her.
Emily looked up.
Before she could speak, a police officer entered the library.
“Mrs. Carter, we found something in your husband’s office.”
He placed a photograph on the table.
It showed Victor standing beside Emily’s father on the night he died.
Victor was holding the same wire cutters that had fallen from his pocket.
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But the date on the photograph revealed something even worse.
Victor had met Emily’s father two years before he claimed they had ever been introduced.
