Chapter 2 - The Architect of Shadows
The signature scrawled across the bottom of the first document was rendered in black fountain pen ink: Julian Vance.
My breath caught in my throat. Julian wasn’t just a partner; he was my late mother’s brother, my uncle, and the chairman of the Belmont Hospitality Trust. When my mother passed away and my world fractured sixteen years ago, Julian was the one who had wrapped an arm around my twenty-three-year-old shoulders in the rain. He was the one who handed me the bank statements showing empty corporate vaults and whispered that my father had emptied them before fleeing to Europe with a mistress. I had believed him. I had hated my father for sixteen years because of the poison Julian fed me while building his own fortune on our grief.
Now, sitting in the penthouse suite on the thirty-sixth floor of the Belmont Grand, I stared at a restraining order accompanied by a forced medical power of attorney dated two days after my mother’s funeral. It remanded Thomas Belmont to a private, off-grid psychiatric care facility in upstate New York under an alias: Arthur Campbell.
“He told me you signed it, Addy,” my father whispered, his voice trembling like dried parchment. He sat wrapped in an Egyptian cotton robe that swallowed his emaciated frame, a mug of warm chamomile tea cradled in his spotted hands. Lucy stood by the window, quietly watching the door, her hands folded in front of her uniform apron. “Julian told me that if I ever tried to contact you, he’d release fraudulent audits framing you for the missing trust funds. You were twenty-three, son. You had just designed your first boutique property. He told me he’d put you in federal prison unless I disappeared.”
“He locked you away,” I choked out, the room spinning around me. The luxury of the suite, the Italian marble, the panoramic view of Central Park—it all felt like a gilded cage built on top of my father’s bones. “For sixteen years?”
“Ten years in that place,” my father murmured, staring into his tea. “Until the facility went bankrupt and closed down. After that, I was just a ghost. No papers, no identification, no money. Julian’s private security kept tabs on me. Every time I tried to reach your office, men in dark sedans intercepted me. Last week, I heard Julian was finalizing a deal to sell the Belmont Grand to an offshore syndicate. I knew it was my last chance before you were completely isolated. So I walked. It took me six days to walk here from Pennsylvania.”
A knock rattled the heavy oak door. Lucy tensed. I signaled for her to stay back and walked to the door, checking the security display.
It was Jason Mercer. Standing behind him were two men in dark tailored overcoats who did not belong to my hotel’s security team.
I opened the door only a fraction, keeping the security latch engaged. “Jason. I told you to wait in my office.”
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“Mr. Belmont, we have a serious compliance issue,” Jason said, his voice clipped and hurried. “These gentlemen are from Vantage Asset Management. They represent Mr. Vance. They claim the man you brought up here is an escaped patient with a history of violent delusions, and they have an active conservatorship warrant. Mr. Vance specifically instructed us to hand him over quietly before the press gets wind of this.”
Behind Jason, one of the suited men reached inside his breast pocket, stepping toward the threshold.
