Chapter 4 - The Lie of Twenty Years
The sudden, sharp crash of the gold watch hitting the marble floor broke the spell over the head table.
Richard Sterling reacted instantly. He stood up, his chair scraping violently against the floorboards, his face dark with sudden, aggressive panic. He grabbed Victoria forcefully by her silk-clad upper arm, trying to pull her back away from the child.
"Victoria! That's enough!" Richard shouted, his voice echoing loudly through the silent hall, carrying an unnatural, desperate edge. "The child is lying! It's a sick trick executed by our corporate competitors! Security, get this beggar out of my house immediately!"
Miller and three heavy-set guards surged forward, reaching out their large hands to grab the girl’s small shoulders.
"DON'T TOUCH HER!" Victoria roared.
It was not the voice of a refined corporate matriarch. It was the primal, terrifying shriek of a mother whose world had just been torn open at the seams.
Victoria spun around, her eyes flashing with a lethal, unhinged fury that made the four security guards freeze in their tracks. She violently shoved Richard’s hand off her arm, turning her full, imposing frame toward her husband.
"If anyone lays a single finger on this child," Victoria spat, her chest heaving as she pulled the little girl behind her emerald silk skirt, "I will have them ruined by morning. Do you hear me?!"
Richard took a step back, raising his hands in a defensive posture, though his eyes darted nervously toward Julian Vance, the family attorney sitting two seats down. Vance had gone completely pale, his hands trembling as he hastily gathered his leather documents folder from the table.
Victoria dropped back down onto her knees directly in front of the little girl, entirely uncaring that her multi-thousand-dollar satin gown was gathering rain water and mud from the child's boots.
She grabbed the girl’s small, cold hands, holding them tight against her chest.
"Tell me," Victoria begged, tears spilling freely over her eyelashes, ruining her makeup, dripping down her pale neck. "Tell me everything. Where is Sarah? Where is your mother?!"
The little girl looked up at Victoria, her eyes filled with an old, profound grief that no six-year-old child should ever possess.
"Mommy is... mommy is sleeping in the wooden cabin by the lighthouse," the girl sobbed, her small shoulders shaking. "She was very sick for a long time. She coughed... and then she stopped moving yesterday. Before she closed her eyes... she gave me the watch and the bracelet. She said... 'Go to the big house on the cliff, Charlotte. Find the lady with the falcon watch. Tell her Sarah sent you home.'"
Victoria let out a strangled sob, pulling the wet, muddy child tightly into her arms, burying her face into the girl's tangled hair.
Twenty years ago, after a bitter disagreement with her autocratic father regarding her private life, a young Victoria had given birth to a baby girl in a secluded coastal clinic thirty miles north of the city. Three days later, while Victoria was still unconscious from severe fever complications, her father and Richard—then her father's top executive associate—had informed her that a tragic fire had consumed the nursery wing.
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They had shown her a charred medical report. They had given her an urn filled with ash.
They had told her Sarah was dead.
