Chapter 4 - The Diary Hidden in the Silk Lining
It was nearly two in the morning when the faint click of the bathroom door woke Emily from a restless, feverish slumber. Her eyes snapped open. The room was bathed in the pale blue glow of the streetlights outside.
A shadowy figure stepped out from the en-suite bathroom, wearing the standard gray scrubs of the hospital’s sanitation staff. Emily opened her mouth to scream, but the figure ripped down their paper surgical mask and raised a finger to their lips.
"Mrs. Sterling—I mean, Miss Emily! Please, don't scream! It's me!"
Emily blinked through the darkness. "Elena?"
It was Elena, the young housemaid from Blackwood Castle. But she looked terrified. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of an oversized maintenance jacket. She crept toward the bed on tiptoes, constantly watching the frosted glass panel on the door.
"Elena, what are you doing here? How did you get into this wing?" Emily whispered, her heart racing.
"I have a cousin who works on the night janitorial crew here," Elena breathed, leaning close over the bed rail. "Miss Emily, you have to listen to me. They fired me. Julian’s head of security fired me the moment the ambulance left the castle. They threatened to revoke my mother’s visa if I spoke to any journalists. But before they threw me off the property, I went back to the bridal suite to get my belongings."
Elena reached into the lining of her jacket and pulled out a thick, leather-bound volume wrapped in plastic. The edges were worn, and the brass clasp had been forcibly pried open.
"I found this in Victoria’s overnight bag," Elena said, thrusting it into Emily’s hands. "Victoria didn't come to your suite to kill you today, Miss Emily. She came to stop the wedding. She was looking for this before you walked into the room."
Emily looked down at the journal. Her breath caught in her throat. It was her father’s personal journal—the private ledger Arthur Vance used to record his private meetings, not the corporate balance sheets.
"Where did Victoria get this?" Emily asked, her fingers trembling as she pulled back the plastic cover.
"From your father’s safe at the downtown penthouse," Elena said. "Miss Emily... while you were dangling from that balcony, Victoria was screaming at you, but she wasn't just screaming nonsense. Right before you walked out onto the terrace, I was coming down the hall. I saw a man—one of Julian’s private security men—tampering with the stone balusters with a diamond-blade saw at six in the morning. They weakened the rail on purpose!"
A suffocating darkness seemed to close in on the hospital room.
"The railing was supposed to collapse when I leaned against it," Emily whispered, the horrifying jigsaw puzzle pieces suddenly slamming into place. "It was meant to look like an accident. An old stone railing crumbling under the weight of an expectant mother."
"Yes!" Elena whispered, tears of terror shining in her eyes. "Victoria found out! She knew Julian was going to kill you today! She ran into the suite to drag you away from the balcony, but when she saw you wearing the veil, she went crazy trying to pull you inside. But when you fought back, you backed onto the rail! Victoria didn't push you to hurt you—she tackled you trying to keep you from leaning on the center pillar! But she hit you too hard, and the rail gave way anyway!"
"Then why did she laugh?" Emily gasped, remembering the manic, terrifying sound of her sister’s voice. "Why did she step on my veil?"
"She wasn't laughing, Miss Emily! She was screaming in total hysterics! She thought you were already dead! And she was stepping on the veil because Julian’s man had sprayed the train with a dry accelerant—she was trying to tear the fabric off you so you wouldn't get dragged down!" Elena’s voice broke. "Victoria is erratic, yes. She’s angry, yes. But she didn't want you dead. Julian wants you dead."
With trembling hands, Emily flipped open her father's ledger to the final entry, dated three days before Arthur Vance’s fatal crash. Her father's neat, aristocratic handwriting filled the page:
> *May 14th.*
> *The audits on Sterling Innovations are catastrophic. Julian has not built a breakthrough quantum chip; he has built a Ponzi scheme of unprecedented proportions. Over two billion dollars in investor capital has vanished into offshore shell accounts in the Caymans. He intends to use the Vance family trust and our merger to absorb the debt and bury the shortfall before the SEC launches its formal investigation.*
>
> *I confronted him tonight at the Union Club. He smiled. He didn't deny a single word. He told me that if I went to the authorities, Emily would suffer the consequences. He thinks I am a weak old man. I am meeting the federal prosecutor on Monday morning. God forgive me for inviting this devil into my house.*
Below the entry, clipped to the paper, was a folded printout of a wire transfer receipt.
It was a transfer of eight hundred thousand dollars from a blind account belonging to Julian Sterling to a mechanic in rural upstate New York—the very mechanic who had serviced Arthur Vance’s Jaguar forty-eight hours before its brakes mysteriously failed.
Emily pressed her hand over her mouth, stifling a scream of pure, undiluted agony.
Her father had been murdered.
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And she had carried the murderer’s child in her womb while preparing to swear an eternal oath to him before God.
***
