Chapter 5 - Shadows in the Polaroid
Grant could not breathe.
The air in the courtyard felt thick as wet wool, burning his throat as he knelt down on one knee on the bluestone pavers, bringing himself down until he was level with Sky’s face. He didn't care about the tailored fabric of his trousers grinding against the stone. He didn't care that his security guards were exchanging alarmed glances near the gatehouse.
"Your mommy," Grant choked out, his large hands hovering around the child's shoulders, terrified that if he touched her, she would dissolve like mist. "Where is she? Where is your mother?"
Sky’s lower lip quivered for a fraction of a second—the first sign of vulnerability she had shown since marching through the gates. She reached back into the crinkled brown paper bag, her small fingers rummaging at the bottom.
"Mommy had to go to sleep," Sky whispered, her high voice dropping into a quiet, matter-of-fact sadness that tore through Grant’s ribs like a serrated blade. "In the white room with the loud machines. But before she went to sleep, she gave me this. She said I had to find the big iron gate with the eagles, and give it to the man with the dark hair and the stormy eyes."
Sky pulled her hand from the bag.
Between her two small fingers was a vintage, white-bordered Polaroid photograph. The chemical film was slightly yellowed at the edges, the glossy surface spiderwebbed with fine cracks from being handled hundreds of times, but the image remained vivid, frozen in the golden light of an August afternoon twenty-two years ago.
Grant took the photograph with fingers that were violently, uncontrollably shaking.
Staring back at him from the glossy paper was himself at sixteen years old.
He was standing on the cedar docks of the family’s summer cabin in Friday Harbor, his hair wild and windblown, wearing an old gray crewneck sweatshirt. Wrapped around his neck in a fierce, laughing headlock was Claire. She was fourteen in the photo, her face radiant, unblemished, her chestnut curls spilling over her cheeks in the exact, identical ringlets that framed the little girl standing on his terrace today. She was smiling into the camera with that wild, fearless joy that had once been the beating heart of the Hawthorne family.
A hot, jagged sob tore from Grant’s throat—a sound so raw, so broken, that Nova gasped from her wheelchair, her hands flying to her mouth.
Grant pressed his thumb against the image of his sister's face.
She's gone.
The words echoed in his skull like a funeral knell. The white room with the loud machines. An anonymous hospice. A county hospital. Claire had died somewhere in the dark, alone, while he had been sitting in fifty-story glass towers signing nine-figure corporate acquisitions.
"Look, Uncle Grant," Sky murmured softly.
The title struck his sternum with the physical impact of a bullet.
Uncle Grant.
Sky stepped closer, her small, warm finger reaching out to tap the upper right quadrant of the photograph.
Grant blinked through the blur of his tears, forcing his vision to focus on the background behind the dock.
Standing twenty yards back from the water, partially obscured by the dense canopy of the cedar trees, was a third figure.
It was a man.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, standing beside a vintage black Mercedes sedan. His face was turned three-quarters away from the lens, cast in the deep shadow of the pines, but the silhouette was razor-sharp: an aristocratic, severe jawline, dark hair cut with military precision, and a heavy signet ring on his left hand resting against the car's doorframe—a ring bearing the crest of a coiled viper around a broken compass.
Grant’s heart didn't just stop; it felt as though it had turned to ash.
Every drop of color fled from his face, leaving his skin the shade of bleached bone beneath his stubble. His breath locked in his chest. His eyes dilated until the dark hazel irises were swallowed by black pupils.
He knew that ring.
May you like
He knew that car.
He knew that shadow.
