Chapter 16 - THE WOMAN WITH HELEN’S FACETheodore stared at the woman standing inside the underground chamber.
For a moment, the bloodied knife in Gabriel’s hand, the federal agent holding the Orpheus ledger, and the restraints cutting into Theodore’s wrists ceased to matter.
The woman wore Helen Hart’s pearl earrings.
Her hair fell to her shoulders exactly as Helen’s had on the night she died.
Even the small crease between her brows was the same.
“No,” Theodore whispered. “I identified your body.”
The woman stepped into the light.
“You identified what Sebastian wanted you to identify.”
Gabriel looked almost amused.
“Tell him your name.”
She ignored him.
Instead, she approached Theodore and touched the faded scar near his temple.
“Helen gave you that scar when she threw the silver frame during your first argument.”
Theodore recoiled.
Only Helen could have known.
Or someone who had been given every private memory she possessed.
The missing federal agent closed the Orpheus ledger.
“She is not our mother.”
The woman turned toward him.
“You never called me Mother, Elias.”
The name struck Theodore harder than the knife had.
Elias.
Theodore had signed that name on a birth certificate twenty-nine years earlier.
The child had lived for less than a day.
Or so he had been told.
Gabriel looked toward the clock mounted above the steel door.
“Amelia will arrive in forty-seven minutes.”
Elias placed the ledger beneath his arm.
“She will not come alone.”
“She thinks she is rescuing her father.”
“She is coming to meet me.”
Gabriel’s smile vanished.
The woman with Helen’s face walked behind Theodore and loosened one of his restraints.
Gabriel raised the knife.
“What are you doing?”
“Giving him enough freedom to watch both of his children choose which one deserves the Hart name.”
Above them, machinery roared.
Water surged through enormous pipes beneath the factory.
Theodore looked at Elias.
“What did they do to you?”
Elias’s gray eyes hardened.
“They taught me that Amelia inherited the family.”
He lifted the ledger.
“And I inherited what the family buried.”
Gabriel’s phone vibrated.
A surveillance image showed Amelia approaching the abandoned factory in an unmarked vehicle.
Nathaniel was not with her.
Gabriel smiled again.
“She came alone.”
Elias studied the image.
“No.”
He enlarged the reflection in the vehicle’s rear window.
A second figure sat hidden behind Amelia.
Nathaniel.
Then the factory lights went out.
In the darkness, Theodore heard a restraint fall open.
A woman’s voice whispered beside him.
“When the shooting begins, do not follow Gabriel.”
“Helen?”
The emergency lights returned.
The woman was gone.
So was the original Orpheus ledger.
Elias stood beside the open steel door.
He looked at Gabriel.
“She chose Amelia.”
Gabriel raised his weapon.
Elias smiled.
May you like
“That was your first mistake.”
A gunshot echoed through the chamber.
Related Stories
