Chapter 4 - THE MIRROR IMAGE
Darkness peeled away slowly, leaving behind a pounding ache in the back of my skull that throbbed in time with my racing pulse.
I tried to move my hands, but rough hemp rope bit deep into my wrists, binding my arms tightly behind the wooden spindle of a chair. My ankles were tied to the chair legs, cinched tight enough to make my toes go numb.
I wasn't in the attic anymore.
The air was damp and smelled of cured lumber, diesel fuel, and dry rot. I was back inside the shed. Sunlight no longer filtered through the wall planks; it was pitch black outside, the only illumination coming from a single battery-powered camping lantern resting on the rusted surface of my grandfather’s workbench.
Across from me, leaning casually against the workbench with her arms crossed, was the woman from the attic.
She was dressed in an expensive charcoal-gray wool coat and leather boots. In the stark, white glare of the LED lantern, looking at her was like staring into an eerie, warped mirror. She had my jaw, my nose, even the slight crook in her front teeth. But where my face had spent twenty-three years softening in small-town warmth, hers was carved into severe, razor-sharp lines.
“Drink,” she said, holding a plastic bottle of water out toward me.
I turned my head away, glaring at her through the tangled hair falling into my eyes. “Who are you?”
“My name is Victoria,” she said smoothly, capping the bottle and setting it back on the bench. “Victoria Hale. Or at least, that’s the name your loving grandfather stamped on my head before he handed me over to a clan of violent, sociopathic criminals.”
“Thomas said…” I swallowed hard, my throat raw and parched. “Thomas said Arthur bought you from a runaway.”
Victoria let out a cold, sharp laugh that held no humor. “Thomas is a dying drunk with half a brain eaten by formaldehyde. My birth mother wasn't a runaway, Megan. She was Arthur and Thomas’s younger sister. Rebecca.”
The revelation hit me like a physical blow, knocking the breath from my chest. “Rebecca? But the newspaper clippings said Rebecca was questioned for kidnapping…”
“Because she helped him!” Victoria snapped, stepping closer, her composure fracturing for a brief second to reveal the boiling rage beneath. “Rebecca got pregnant out of wedlock by a man William Hale hated. William threatened to drown the infant in the Schuylkill River if she didn't give the child up. So Rebecca and Arthur hatched a brilliant, cowardly plan. Arthur would rescue Rebecca's baby—me—and hide me away where William could never find me.”
She pointed a finger directly into my face.
“Except Arthur got greedy. When he walked into that maternity ward on October 14, 1998, he saw you. William’s legitimate newborn daughter, lying there with a trust fund guaranteed to deliver forty million dollars upon adulthood. Arthur realized that if he took you, William would spend every dollar he had tearing the world apart to find you. But if he swapped the bracelets… William would think I was his daughter. And Arthur could raise the true Hale heiress in total obscurity, waiting for the day the trust matured.”
“That’s insane,” I whispered, tears spilling over my cheeks. “My grandfather loved me! He never asked for money. We lived simply. He worked as a carpenter until his back gave out!”
“Because my father—your biological father, William—died in prison before the trust could be liquidated,” Victoria snarled, leaning down so her face was inches from mine. “The trust was locked down by a court injunction until the legitimate daughter reached her twenty-fifth birthday. Which is next Tuesday, Megan.”
I stared at her, horrified. “You survived William. You grew up in that house.”
Victoria’s gaze darkened, shadows pooling in her hollow cheeks. “I grew up in a fortress of paranoia, beatings, and wiretaps. William looked at me every single day of my miserable childhood and knew, deep down, that something wasn't right. I didn't have his eyes. I didn't have his blood. He treated me like a parasite while I bore his cursed name.”
She reached down to the floor, picked up the metal box, and gently tapped the lid.
“For five years, I’ve been tracking down the clinic staff, the forged birth records, the hush money Arthur wired through offshore accounts. And yesterday, Arthur’s pathetic little confession tape gave me the final link. You have William’s DNA. You have the original hospital footprint card inside this box.”
“If you have what you want, why am I tied to this chair?” I asked, terror tightening around my lungs like a vise.
Victoria straightened up, her expression settling back into calculating stillness. She pulled a pair of heavy leather work gloves out of her coat pocket and began slipping them over her slender fingers.
“Because the trust requires a living heir to sign the claim in person before the probate judge in Philadelphia,” she said quietly. “Or… if the living heir dies without issue, the entire estate defaults to the legally recognized daughter on the birth certificate. Me.”
She reached behind her on the workbench, picking up a heavy red plastic can.
The unmistakable, suffocating stench of gasoline washed over the shed as she unscrewed the yellow spout.
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“Arthur wanted you to have what was inside this shed,” Victoria whispered, tilting the can and pouring a steady, splashing stream of fuel along the wooden floorboards, splashing over my boots and soaking the legs of my jeans. “It’s only fitting that you burn with it.”
Outside, tires crunched violently against the gravel driveway. High beams slashed through the cracks in the shed wall, blinding us both.
