"“DID YOUR MOTHER NOT TEACH YOU ANY MANNERS?”

By midnight, the storm had rolled in from the Atlantic, lashing the rugged coastline of Maine with torrential sheets of rain and howling winds.

Inside his sprawling cliffside estate overlooking the harbor, Julian Voss sat in his second-floor study before a glowing wall of monitors. On the central screen, Marcus displayed a digital dossier titled CALLOWAY, DELIA & WREN.

"It’s an intricate paper trail, Boss," Marcus reported, standing beside the desk with a tablet in hand. "On paper, Delia Calloway moved to Cedar Bay eight years ago from a small coastal town in Nova Scotia. She registered Wren's birth certificate locally three years later, claiming the child was born abroad during her travels."

"That doesn't add up," Julian said, his eyes narrowing as he studied a grainy photograph of Delia standing outside a grocery store. "You don't just emerge from thin air with a three-year-old child without hospital records or immunization stamps."

"Precisely," Marcus nodded. "So I dug deeper. I bypassed local registries and pulled federal passenger logs from nine years ago, cross-referencing private obstetrics clinics in Boston. Julian... someone scrubbed those records. Cleaned them right off the digital servers. But they missed an analog paper ledger stored in the basement archives of St. Jude’s Hospital."

Julian stood up slowly, his tall frame cutting a sharp silhouette against the lightning flashing outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. "Go on."

"Nine years ago, on the exact night of the hospital fire that supposedly took your daughter's life, Delia Calloway was working as a senior pediatric head nurse at St. Jude’s," Marcus said grimly. "She disappeared the morning after the fire. And according to staff rotation sheets, she was the attending nurse assigned to Room 402—your daughter's isolation unit."

The air in the study went dead silent. The only sound was the heavy thrum of rain against the glass.

Julian’s breath hitched. Every muscle in his body coiled like spring steel. "She didn't die in the fire."

"The body in that casket was anonymous," Marcus said quietly. "A tragic decoy planted to cover up an abduction—or a rescue. The DNA report you were handed back then? It was signed off by Dr. Harrison, your family’s chief medical consultant at the time."

Julian remembered Dr. Harrison vividly. Harrison had retired to Switzerland two months after the funeral, bought a sprawling vineyard, and died of a sudden heart attack three years later.

Convenient, Julian thought, a dark, murderous rage beginning to simmer in his veins. The betrayal wasn't external; it had come from inside his own inner circle. Someone wanted his bloodline severed to weaken his syndicate standing, using a fabricated tragedy to break him.

"Get the cars ready," Julian ordered, his voice dropping into an arctic register. "We're going to Cedar Bay."