Chapter 8 - Eleanor's Journal
I couldn't move.
The gun in my hand felt suddenly impossibly heavy. The tactical noise, the hum of the servers, the armed men standing around me—everything faded into a soft, ringing silence.
I walked into the room, my heavy tactical boots stepping softly onto a hand-woven wool rug.
“Mother?” I asked, the word feeling completely foreign, sharp, and terrifying on my tongue.
Eleanor Vance stood up slowly from her armchair. Though she was small and fragile, her posture was remarkably composed, her face carrying a quiet, regal dignity that thirty years of subterranean imprisonment had failed to break.
“Seventeen years,” she said softly, reaching out a thin, pale hand to touch my cheek. Her fingers were warm against my cold skin. “Your father promised me before he died that he would let you go… that he would tell you the truth when you turned twenty-one.”
“He died when I was eleven,” I managed to say, my voice thick with an emotion I hadn't felt since childhood. “My uncle Dominic told me you died giving birth to me.”
Eleanor turned her head slowly toward the doorway, where Dominic lay huddled against the stone floor, guarded by Dante’s operators.
“Dominic was always the greedy one,” Eleanor said calmly, her grey eyes cutting through him like broken glass. “Vance Duca was a cruel man, but he loved you in his own twisted way, Roman. When he realized he was dying of cancer in ninety-seven, he prepared the paperwork to return my father's stolen estate to you and release me from this place. But Dominic… Dominic poisoned your father’s medication.”
Dominic gasped, looking up in terror. “That’s a lie! She’s insane! She’s been locked down here for thirty years, she’s lost her mind!”
“I haven't lost my mind, Dominic,” Eleanor stated clearly, walking over to the wooden desk and picking up a thick, leather-bound journal filled with thousands of handwritten entries, financial account numbers, and legal property deeds. “I kept the record. Every transfer, every illegal transaction you made using my family’s stolen port licenses… I logged every byte of data that passed through those server racks behind my wall.”
May you like
She held the journal out to me.
“This is the key to the Vance family trust, Roman,” she said softly. “It contains the original maritime deeds to every terminal in Boston Harbor. It’s what your father stole, and what your uncle used to fund his empire.”
