Chapter 2 - The Affidavit of Nathan Vance
The screen of my study terminal flickered, bathing the dark mahogany walls in a pale, amber light as the scanner slowly processed the final sheet of paper. Outside, the wind howled against the reinforced glass like an animal dying in the snow, but inside, the silence was absolute save for the steady, rhythmic beep of the newborn’s heart monitor echoing down the hall.
Mara stood in the doorway, her hands tightly wrung together in her apron. "Dr. Vance... Nathan. What is that page? His face... through the security monitor, I saw him go gray."
I didn't answer immediately. My eyes scanned the legal header, the crisp, unblemished university stamps, and the signature at the bottom—my own signature, notarized twelve years ago, on the day I graduated from Johns Hopkins and took my oath as a physician.
It was an affidavit I had completely forgotten filing.
Long before Sarah met Marcus Kane, before the family fractures and the bitter words that drove my sister away, Marcus had tried to buy his way into a research grant funded by Mercer Holdings and managed through our family’s philanthropic trust. He had proposed a private, unregulated neonatal bio-repository—a clinical loop designed to bypass institutional oversight by funneled donations.
I had investigated him then. I had written a formal, legally binding warning and deposited it into the confidential registry of the state medical board and federal health inspectorate, designating it with a strict non-disclosure clause that would automatically unlock and broadcast to every federal prosecutor in the country if my medical license or my immediate family ever experienced a catastrophic, unexplained disruption.
Marcus hadn't just targeted Sarah because he loved her.
He had targeted her because she was my sister, and he needed access to the Mercer trust to legitimize his shadow network of unrecorded infant trials. When I discovered what he was doing and cut him off from the trust, he had retaliated by systematically isolating Sarah, pulling her into his web until she was too terrified, too gaslit, and too trapped to reach out.
Until tonight. Until she sent her seven-year-old daughter across a frozen mountain with an envelope sewn into her winter coat.
My phone buzzed in my palm. The screen flashed with an incoming call from Marcus Kane.
I swiped to answer, keeping the speaker on so Mara could hear.
"Nathan," Marcus’s voice had lost its smooth, patrician cadence. It was sharp now, clipped, vibrating with suppressed panic. "Listen to me very carefully. Whatever you think you've found in that dossier—it's obsolete. It’s corporate fiction."
"Corporate fiction doesn't carry a federal stamp, Marcus," I said, my voice as cold as the frost biting at the windowpanes. "And it certainly doesn't trigger an automatic wire transfer of all your offshore subsidiaries to the DOJ asset forfeiture division. You’re done."
"You arrogant son of a bitch," Marcus hissed. "You think you can destroy ten years of institutional development with a piece of paper from a dead decade? My men are outside your gate, Nathan. They have thermal optics, breaching charges, and zero oversight. You can't perform surgery on a dead body, and once my men clear that house, there won't be enough left of you or that little girl to identify by dental records."
"Try it," I said.
I tapped the screen, disconnecting the call, and walked back out into the living room where Lily lay cocooned in thermal blankets.
The little girl’s eyes fluttered open again. Her breathing was less ragged now, though her skin remained dangerously pale. She looked up at me, her small fingers reaching out blindly until they brushed against my watch strap.
"Uncle... Nathan?" she whispered, the name tasting foreign on her lips. "Mommy said... Mommy said you were the only one who didn't lie."
I knelt beside the sofa, my hands steady despite the adrenaline roaring in my veins. "I’m here, Lily. I’ve got you. Where is Mommy?"
A tear tracked down the little girl's cold cheek, freezing before it reached her chin. "They took her. After I left through the cellar window... men in black coats put her in the back of the big silver van. She was screaming, Uncle Nathan. She was screaming your name."
My chest tightened with a searing, intolerable agony.
"Mara," I said, looking up at my housekeeper. "Keep the warming packs rotating on the infants. Monitor Number Seventeen's oxygen saturation. If it drops below ninety, administer the pediatric epinephrine from the trauma bag in my study."
"Where are you going, Dr. Vance?" Mara asked, her eyes wide with terror as another heavy thud shook the iron gates outside.
May you like
I stood up, unbuttoning my blood-stained surgical shirt and reaching into the hall closet. My fingers closed around the cold, heavy steel of my hunting rifle—a relic of my grandfather’s cabin in the Rockies, cleaned and oiled every autumn, though I had never expected to point it at anything more dangerous than a stray wolf.
"I'm going to let them in," I said.
