Chapter 2 - The Command Center in the Pines
Victoria Vance stood paralyzed in the center of the waiting room, her designer fur coat hanging heavy on her shoulders. Her face was a mask of aristocratic disgust mixed with the first creeping tendrils of genuine terror.
“How dare you!” Victoria hissed, trying to summon the authority she had used to crush her competitors in the real estate market for thirty years. “You are in a public medical facility! Marcus, call the police immediately! This man is threatening us!”
Marcus didn't move. He stood in front of the sliding glass exit doors, his hands clasped behind his back, his body acting as an immovable iron wall. Two other security guards—men who had secretly been on my payroll since the day I bought a house in Lake Placid—stepped up beside him, their hands resting ominously on their sidearms.
“The police will not be coming tonight, Mrs. Vance,” Marcus said coldly. “The local precinct has just received a high-priority federal lockdown notification. All roads within a ten-mile radius of this hospital are currently closed for 'military maneuvers.'”
Julian dropped to his knees, clutching his mother’s coat hem, his voice high and hysterical. “Mom, you don't understand! That’s the Ghost King! He’s the one who wiped out the entire Russian mob in Brooklyn three years ago! He owns the docks! He owns the banks! He owns everything!”
“Shut up, Julian!” Victoria snapped, though her own hands were beginning to shake so violently that her heavy gold bracelets clinked together like tiny death bells. She turned her glare back onto me. “Elias, this is ridiculous! You are Elena’s husband! You signed a prenuptial agreement! You have no standing here!”
I didn't answer her. I didn't waste my breath on dead people.
I pulled my encrypted satellite phone from my belt, unlocked the screen, and dialed a three-digit sequence.
The line connected on the first ring.
“My Lord,” a crisp, formal voice answered. It was Gabriel, my chief of operations, calling from our central command hub in Zurich. “We tracked the emergency beacon. Is the Lady Elena safe?”
“She is in the ICU,” I replied, my eyes fixed on Victoria’s terrified face. “Her core temperature was eighty-eight degrees when I found her. She has severe frostbite on her feet, a fractured cheekbone, and a lacerated cheek.”
Over the line, I heard the sound of heavy metal chairs sliding backward and a collective gasp from the room of elite lieutenants who managed my global operations. Elena was loved by my men. Whenever they visited our house under the guise of my "logistics colleagues," she would cook them home-cooked meals, sew buttons on their jackets, and treat them like human beings. To my men, she was a saint.
“Who did this?” Gabriel’s voice had lost all its formal polish. It was now a blade coated in poison.
“Her mother. Her sister. Her brother,” I said. “Execute Protocol Omega across the Vance family portfolio.”
“Understood, My Lord,” Gabriel replied. “Initiating asset liquidation in three... two... one.”
Victoria’s smartphone, sitting inside her leather handbag, began to ring. Then Julian’s phone rang. Then a secondary notification chime echoed from Victoria’s bag, followed by a third, a fourth, and a fifth.
Victoria snatched her phone out, answering it with a trembling hand. “Hello? What is it?”
“Mrs. Vance!” her chief financial officer yelled over the speaker, his voice audible to everyone in the quiet hallway. “Every bank account associated with Vance International has been frozen by the Treasury Department! Our lines of credit in New York, London, and Tokyo have been canceled! The stock exchange has halted trading on our shares due to an unprecedented short-sell attack!”
Before Victoria could process the words, Julian’s phone screen flashed red.
“Mom!” Julian screamed, holding his phone out like it was a venomous snake. “My offshore trust account in Grand Cayman just cleared out! Sixty million dollars... gone! The bank says the account holder was listed as a ghost entity and the funds were transferred to a humanitarian foundation in Elena’s name!”
Victoria looked up at me, her eyes wild, her lip trembling. “What... what are you doing to us?”
“I am taking away your kingdom, Victoria,” I said, stepping closer to her until I could smell the expensive French perfume masking her cold sweat. “You beat my wife because she refused to sign away her father’s estate. You thought that forty acres and a resort company made you powerful. You thought money gave you the right to treat a gentle soul like garbage.”
I leaned down until my lips were an inch from her ear.
“By sunrise, you will not own the shoes on your feet. You will not own the breath in your lungs. You will be a beggar in the very town you thought you ruled.”
At that moment, the door to Trauma Bay 1 opened.
A senior surgeon walked out, pulling off his surgical mask. He looked exhausted, but his eyes were filled with relief as he bowed deeply toward me.
May you like
“Lord Ghost,” the surgeon said respectfully. “We have stabilized Lady Elena. Her core temperature is rising, and we have stitched her cheek. She is conscious... and she is calling for her husband.”
I turned my back on Victoria and Julian without another word and walked into my wife’s room.
