PART 4
The explosion lifted me off my feet.
For one impossible second, I was weightless.
Then my shoulder struck the marble floor, glass shattered above me, and a wave of heat rolled through the bank lobby.
People screamed.
The fire alarm vanished beneath a deeper roar as smoke burst from the hallway leading to the vault.
Detective Ortiz landed beside an overturned desk. Lucan struck one of the lobby columns and collapsed.
I could not hear anything except a high ringing inside my skull.
Through the smoke beyond the locked entrance doors, I saw the stranger turn his head.
He had Lucan’s face.
He had my curved little finger.
And he carried the package my mother had hidden more than twenty years earlier.
Then the emergency locks released.
The doors slid open.
The crowd outside scattered.
The stranger disappeared among them.
I forced myself onto my knees.
“Lucan!”
He lay near the column with blood running from his forehead.
I crawled toward him, but Detective Ortiz caught my coat.
“Stay down!”
“The man—”
“Forget him. The ceiling may come down.”
A security guard pulled Lucan away from the column while two bank employees dragged an injured woman toward the exit.
Smoke swallowed the lobby.
Detective Ortiz pushed me through the doors.
Outside, people were running in every direction. Car alarms screamed along the street. Papers floated through the air like white birds.
I searched every face.
The stranger was gone.
Fire engines arrived less than three minutes later.
Paramedics placed Lucan and me beside the same ambulance. He had a cut above his eyebrow and two bruised ribs. My shoulder was swollen, but nothing appeared broken.
Detective Ortiz stood in the road, shouting instructions into her phone.
When she finally approached us, ash covered one side of her coat.
“The explosion began inside the private vault,” she said. “Someone placed an incendiary device behind the safe-deposit wall.”
“The package,” I said. “He wanted to destroy whatever he left behind.”
“Or destroy the records showing who accessed the box.”
“He knew we were coming.”
Lucan pressed gauze against his forehead.
“He wanted us to see him.”
Detective Ortiz turned toward him.
“You know more about that man than you’ve admitted.”
“I know what my mother told me once.”
“You said he was your brother.”
“He may be.”
“That is not an answer.”
Lucan looked toward the burning bank.
“My father was obsessed with appearances. He believed weakness was something a family could hide if it locked the right door.”
“What does that have to do with the man we saw?”
“When I was fourteen, I found a photograph inside my father’s desk. It showed my mother in a hospital bed holding two newborn boys.”
“Twins?”
“That’s what I assumed. One infant had a dark birthmark across his shoulder. The other did not.”
“Did you have the birthmark?”
“No.”
“Did Calder or Bram?”
“No.”
Detective Ortiz stared at him.
“Then who was the second baby?”
“My father caught me with the photograph. He burned it in the fireplace.”
Lucan’s voice became quieter.
“That night, my mother came into my room and told me that I had a brother named Merrick.”
The name still felt wrong when spoken about someone else.
“She said he died?” I asked.
“She said my father told her he died.”
“But she didn’t believe him.”
“No.”
“Why didn’t she search for him?”
“She did. My father threatened to have her committed.”
Detective Ortiz folded her arms.
“And Calder and Bram?”
“They were born the following year.”
I stared at him.
“But you said the three of you were born together.”
“I was repeating what my mother told me during one of her confused periods. She mixed memories. I believed Calder and Bram’s birth records had been changed.”
“So there weren’t triplets?”
“Not according to the photograph.”
Detective Ortiz’s expression hardened.
“Your family history changes every time new evidence appears.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds like you’re constructing explanations.”
Lucan looked at me.
“I’m telling you what I remember.”
“What else did your mother say about Merrick?” I asked.
“That he was born eleven minutes before me.”
“Older twin.”
“Yes.”
“Why would your father hide him?”
“She said Merrick had seizures as an infant. My father believed a sick child would embarrass him.”
The cruelty of it was easy to imagine.
A man ashamed of a baby.
A family willing to erase one of its own.
“What happened to him?” Detective Ortiz asked.
“My father claimed he died during treatment at a private institution.”
“But there was no death certificate?”
“I never found one.”
I looked toward the street where the stranger had vanished.
“Where would a hidden child grow up?”
Lucan’s face darkened.
“There was a home outside Scranton called Saint Orison’s.”
Detective Ortiz immediately wrote down the name.
“A hospital?”
“A religious residential facility. My father’s printing company produced its forms and newsletters.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“Once, when I was seventeen.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. Father left me inside the car.”
Lucan closed his eyes.
“But a boy stood at an upstairs window. He looked exactly like me.”
The paramedic beside us stopped wrapping my shoulder.
“You saw your twin and never told anyone?”
“I told my mother. She broke down. My father said I had imagined it.”
“And you believed him?”
“I wanted to.”
I stepped away from the ambulance.
The movement sent pain through my shoulder, but I barely felt it.
“Where is Saint Orison’s now?”
Lucan opened his eyes.
“Closed.”
“When?”
“After an abuse investigation in 1998.”
“Where did the residents go?”
“I don’t know.”
Detective Ortiz’s phone rang.
She listened for less than thirty seconds.
Then her face changed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The bank’s external cameras captured the man leaving.”
“Where did he go?”
“He entered a gray pickup parked two blocks away.”
“License plate?”
“Registered to Bram Voss.”
Lucan stood so quickly the paramedic protested.
“Bram is in custody.”
“I know,” Detective Ortiz said.
“Then someone has access to his truck.”
“Or Bram gave him access before his arrest.”
I remembered Mr. Givens lying at the bottom of the basement stairs.
“Bram knew about the safe-deposit box.”
“Apparently.”
“Could the stranger have attacked Givens?”
“It’s possible.”
“And framed Bram?”
“Also possible.”
Lucan pulled the gauze away from his forehead.
“We need to speak to him.”
“You are not joining an interrogation.”
“He may know where Merrick is.”
Detective Ortiz looked at me.
“Both of you are going to the hospital.”
“No.”
“That was not a request.”
“My grandmother was poisoned. Someone stole my mother’s notebook, framed me for buying the poison, impersonated Lucan, and blew up a bank. I’m not going home to wait for another message.”
Her expression softened only slightly.
“You cannot help if you’re dead.”
Before I could answer, my phone vibrated.
Unknown number.
A video had arrived.
The image was dark and unstable.
For several seconds, I saw only a concrete wall.
Then the camera turned.
Mr. Givens sat tied to a metal chair.
His head had been bandaged after the attack, but fresh blood ran from his nose. His hands were bound behind him.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
The ambulance that had taken him away had gone to the hospital.
Detective Ortiz grabbed my phone.
“When was this sent?”
“Just now.”
A man stepped into the video.
He wore a black coat and leather gloves. His face remained outside the frame.
He placed my mother’s notebook on a table beside Mr. Givens.
Then he held up a handwritten sign.
COME TO THE HOUSE WHERE LUCan WAS BURIED.
Another sign followed.
BRING LUCan.
The video ended.
Detective Ortiz called the hospital.
Mr. Givens had never arrived.
The ambulance carrying him had been intercepted four blocks from Mrs. Voss’s house. A vehicle had blocked the road. Two men wearing police jackets ordered the paramedics out at gunpoint.
The ambulance was found abandoned twenty minutes later.
Mr. Givens was gone.
Lucan stared at the dark screen.
“The house where I was buried.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“Our family owned a summer house near Lake Nockamixon.”
Detective Ortiz ended her call.
“Address.”
Lucan gave it to her.
She sent officers immediately.
But before she finished, another message appeared.
NO POLICE.
A photograph followed.
It showed Mr. Givens with a cord tightened around his throat.
Beneath it were six words.
I WILL KNOW IF THEY COME.
Detective Ortiz looked at us.
“He expects us to react emotionally.”
“He has Givens,” I said.
“And he may kill all of you if you walk into a trap.”
“He wants Lucan.”
Lucan took my phone from her.
“No. He wants Merrick.”
I could not tell which one of us he meant.
Detective Ortiz refused to allow us to leave alone.
She also refused to abandon Mr. Givens.
A tracking team prepared an unmarked vehicle while officers searched the abandoned ambulance and reviewed traffic cameras.
Lucan and I were placed in a private room at the hospital under guard.
For the first time since he had stepped out of the sedan, we were alone.
He sat beside the window with a bandage across his forehead.
I remained near the door.
“You knew the name Merrick before my mother named me,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her about your brother?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“Before the warehouse fire.”
“Did she like the name?”
“She said it sounded lonely.”
I laughed bitterly.
“That was accurate.”
Lucan lowered his eyes.
“I thought she named you after him because she knew how much losing him haunted me.”
“Or she named me after my real father.”
Lucan flinched.
“You believe the message?”
“I don’t believe anyone.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“That does not make it better.”
“No.”
I pulled Mrs. Voss’s DNA report from my coat.
“The sample came from your father.”
“Yes.”
“It proves I’m his grandson.”
“Yes.”
“But you, Calder, Bram, and this hidden brother are all his sons.”
“Yes.”
“So any one of you could be my father.”
“Calder and Bram were teenagers when you were conceived.”
“Then it is either you or him.”
Lucan nodded.
“Did my mother ever meet your brother?”
“Not that I knew.”
“Did anyone ever mistake you for someone else around her?”
His silence lasted too long.
“What happened?” I asked.
Lucan rubbed both hands across his face.
“About two months before Elise became pregnant, she told me she had seen me outside her apartment late at night.”
“Were you there?”
“No.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That she must have seen Calder.”
“Did Calder resemble you?”
“Not closely enough.”
“And you didn’t think of Merrick?”
“I believed he was dead.”
“But she saw someone with your face.”
“Yes.”
The room seemed to contract.
“Did it happen again?”
“Three times.”
“What did your mother say?”
“She began locking her windows.”
“Was she afraid of you?”
“Not then.”
“But later she was.”
Lucan looked toward the door.
“After the warehouse fire, after I called her from hiding, she said my voice sounded different.”
“Different how?”
“She said I called her before.”
“You did call her.”
“No.”
His eyes met mine.
“She said I had called two weeks earlier and asked her to meet me alone.”
My mouth went dry.
“Did she go?”
“She would never tell me.”
“What happened after that meeting?”
“She stopped saying the baby was mine.”
I felt as though the floor had shifted.
“What did she say?”
“That the truth was more complicated.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this outside?”
“Because I did not want the first thing you learned about me to be that I might not be your father.”
“You let me believe you were.”
“I believed it too.”
“Because you wanted to?”
“Yes.”
The honesty made me angrier.
I reached for the door.
Lucan stood.
“Merrick.”
“Do not call me that.”
“It is your name.”
“It was his first.”
“I know.”
“Maybe everything I thought belonged to me belonged to him first. The name. My mother. My father.”
Lucan stepped closer.
“You are not a copy of anyone.”
“How would you know? You met me two hours ago.”
“I watched you stand beside my mother when her own children abandoned her.”
“You watched from a distance. That seems to be what you do best.”
He accepted the blow without defending himself.
A knock came from the hallway.
Detective Ortiz entered.
“We found something in the ambulance.”
She placed a photograph on the bed.
It showed a small stone house beside a lake. Four children stood on the porch.
Sabine appeared to be ten or eleven. Calder and Bram were younger.
Beside them stood two identical boys.
Lucan picked up the photograph.
His hand began shaking.
“That’s me.”
He pointed to the child on the left.
The boy wore a striped shirt.
The child beside him wore a plain white one.
“Who took this?” Detective Ortiz asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Look at the back.”
Lucan turned it over.
Four names were written in blue ink.
Sabine.
Calder.
Bram.
Lucan.
There was no fifth name.
Yet five children were visible.
Below the names, someone had added a sentence.
One son stayed. One son was sent away.
The handwriting belonged to Mrs. Voss.
“Why would your mother label both twins as one person?” I asked.
Lucan stared at the picture.
“She was hiding him.”
“From whom?”
“Our father.”
Detective Ortiz pointed toward a dark patch near the lake.
“Crime-scene technicians enlarged this section.”
She showed us another image.
A man stood behind the trees watching the children.
Their father.
In one hand, he held a length of rope.
Lucan sat down.
“What happened at that house?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You called it the place where you were buried.”
“That is what my father called it.”
Detective Ortiz waited.
Lucan’s voice became faint.
“When I was eight, I woke up in the woods at night. My clothes were wet. There was dirt beneath my fingernails.”
“What else?”
“My father was standing beside a hole.”
I stopped breathing.
“What was inside it?”
“A wooden box.”
“Was someone in the box?”
“I heard scratching.”
The hospital room fell silent.
“What did your father do?” the detective asked.
“He told me my sick brother had died and that we were going to bury him before my mother saw the body.”
“But he wasn’t dead.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You heard scratching.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I ran to the house and found my mother. She struck my father with a fireplace shovel when he came inside.”
Lucan pressed both hands to his temples.
“The next morning, she told me it had been a nightmare.”
“Did you return to the hole?”
“I couldn’t find it.”
Detective Ortiz took the photograph.
“The stranger wants you to remember.”
“No,” Lucan whispered. “He wants me to confess.”
“To what?”
Lucan looked at me.
“That I helped bury him.”
At sunset, Detective Ortiz agreed to take us near the lake house.
She did not agree to let us enter alone.
A tactical team followed at a distance without lights. Officers positioned themselves along the surrounding roads.
Lucan and I rode in an unmarked sedan with Detective Ortiz.
No one spoke during the drive.
The farther we traveled from Philadelphia, the narrower the roads became. Houses disappeared behind fields and thick stretches of forest.
My phone vibrated every ten minutes.
Each message contained a new photograph of Mr. Givens.
In the last one, his chair had been moved beside a window.
Outside the window was dark water.
We reached the lake shortly after nine.
The summer house stood at the end of an overgrown driveway.
It was smaller than the photograph suggested. Moss covered the stone walls, and several roof tiles were missing. The windows had been boarded from the inside.
No lights were visible.
Detective Ortiz parked fifty yards away.
“You wait here until my team reaches position.”
My phone vibrated.
A live video appeared.
Mr. Givens sat inside the house.
A digital timer rested on his lap.
Five minutes.
The stranger stood behind him with one gloved hand on his shoulder.
He held up a sign.
LUCan AND MERRICK ENTER ALONE.
Then he pointed toward the timer.
Detective Ortiz swore under her breath.
“It may be fake.”
“What if it isn’t?” I asked.
“We cannot allow you inside an unsecured building.”
Lucan opened his door.
Detective Ortiz grabbed his coat.
“If you go in there, I cannot guarantee your safety.”
“You cannot guarantee Givens’s safety out here.”
He looked at me.
“You stay.”
“No.”
“Merrick—”
“He asked for both of us.”
“He is my brother.”
“He may be my father.”
Lucan had no reply.
We walked toward the house.
Detective Ortiz followed until my phone displayed another message.
TWO STEPS MORE AND GIVENS DIES.
She stopped.
“Keep your phone connected,” she said. “Do not remove it from your pocket.”
The front door opened before we reached it.
No one stood behind it.
Inside, candles burned along the walls.
Dust covered the old furniture. Family photographs had been arranged across the floor, all facing upward.
Every photograph containing the second boy had been cut in half.
A speaker crackled somewhere above us.
“Welcome home, brother.”
The voice sounded like Lucan’s.
Not similar.
Identical.
Lucan looked toward the staircase.
“Merrick.”
A quiet laugh came through the speaker.
“You remember my name now.”
“Where is Givens?”
“Where you left me.”
We followed a row of candles through the kitchen.
A trapdoor stood open in the floor.
Stone steps descended into a cellar.
Mr. Givens sat at the bottom, tied to the chair.
The timer on his lap showed two minutes.
I ran toward him.
Lucan grabbed my arm.
“Wait.”
Thin wires ran from the chair to metal containers beneath the stairs.
Fuel.
A motion sensor blinked beside the timer.
The speaker came alive again.
“If either of you crosses the red line, the cellar burns.”
A stripe of red paint stretched across the floor five feet before the chair.
Mr. Givens lifted his head.
“Merrick, don’t.”
“Which one?” the voice asked.
The stranger stepped from behind a stone pillar.
Seeing him clearly was worse than watching the bank footage.
He and Lucan had the same height, the same eyes, and nearly the same scar. But the stranger’s hair was longer, and his face was thinner.
The smile belonged to someone who had practiced being pleasant without ever feeling kindness.
He held my mother’s notebook.
“Hello, Lucan,” he said.
Lucan stared at him.
“I thought Father killed you.”
“He tried.”
Lucan’s eyes filled.
“I heard you inside the box.”
“Yes.”
“I was eight.”
“So was I.”
“I tried to find you.”
“You went back to bed.”
“My mother told me it was a nightmare.”
“And you believed her because believing her was easier.”
The timer continued counting.
One minute, thirty seconds.
“Release Givens,” Lucan said.
His brother looked at the old man.
“Alton helped your mother hide me after Father dragged me from the grave.”
Mr. Givens closed his eyes.
“You knew him?” I asked.
“For years,” the stranger said.
“Then why did he hide your existence?”
“Because Odette asked him to.”
“Why?”
“Because our father promised to kill every person who knew I had survived.”
Lucan stepped closer to the red line.
“What did Father do to you?”
“Nothing that death would not have improved.”
The stranger’s voice remained calm, but his gloved hand tightened around the notebook.
“Saint Orison’s taught me not to cry. Father visited every month to make certain I had not spoken. He told the staff my seizures were demonic.”
Lucan looked sick.
“I didn’t know.”
“You benefited from not knowing.”
The timer reached one minute.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The stranger turned toward me.
“To meet my son.”
Lucan moved in front of me.
“He is not your son.”
“Are you certain?”
He opened my mother’s notebook.
“Elise was certain by the end.”
My heartbeat became painful.
“Read it,” I said.
He smiled.
“Come across the line.”
Lucan caught my sleeve.
“No.”
The stranger lifted a small remote.
“Then Alton dies.”
Thirty seconds.
Mr. Givens looked at me.
“Don’t believe him.”
“Tell him the truth, Alton,” the stranger said.
Givens shook his head.
The stranger pressed one button on the remote.
The timer stopped at twenty-three seconds.
Silence filled the cellar.
He placed the remote in his pocket.
“There is no bomb attached to the timer.”
Lucan exhaled.
Then the stranger pointed toward the fuel cans.
“But there is enough gasoline beneath this house to turn every stone black.”
“What do you want?” Lucan repeated.
“A confession.”
“For what?”
“For taking my life.”
“You think I chose what Father did?”
“You took my name.”
“My name was Lucan.”
“After they buried me, Mother called you Merrick for six months.”
Lucan froze.
The stranger smiled.
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“She could not accept that the son named Merrick was gone, so she gave you my name. Father changed it after she began confusing us in public.”
I remembered Mrs. Voss staring at my face on the first day.
You’re Merrick?
She had not only been seeing her missing son.
She had been seeing the name stolen from him.
The stranger looked at me.
“Elise knew the story. That is why she named you after me.”
“Why would my mother honor you?”
“Because I saved her.”
Lucan shook his head.
“You terrorized her.”
“I watched her because your family was watching her.”
“You called her pretending to be me.”
“I called because she would not speak to a stranger.”
“You met her alone.”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
The stranger’s eyes moved toward me.
“She discovered that the man she loved had allowed fear to become more important than her safety.”
“You manipulated her.”
“I told her the truth.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
The question hung between them.
The stranger did not answer immediately.
Then he looked at me.
“Once.”
Lucan lunged across the red line.
A gunshot exploded through the cellar.
Stone shattered beside his foot.
The stranger held a pistol.
“Do not make me shoot you before he learns which one of us is his father.”
Lucan stopped.
I could not move.
My mother had been pregnant before the warehouse fire.
The timing still pointed toward Lucan.
But I no longer trusted the timing.
“Was it before she became pregnant?” I asked.
The stranger opened the notebook to a marked page.
“Elise wrote the answer herself.”
“Give it to me.”
“First, ask Lucan why she had his blood beneath her fingernails.”
I turned toward him.
Lucan stared at the gun.
“I told you I held her.”
“That was not when she scratched you,” his brother said.
Lucan’s face changed.
“When?” I asked.
He remained silent.
The stranger answered.
“Three days before she died, Lucan broke into her apartment.”
“That’s a lie.”
Mr. Givens spoke from the chair.
“No.”
Lucan looked at him.
Givens’s voice shook.
“Elise called me that night. She said Lucan had come through the kitchen window.”
“Why?” I asked.
Lucan lowered his head.
“I wanted the notebook.”
“Why?”
“It contained information that could expose where I was living.”
“You attacked her?”
“She attacked me when I tried to take it.”
“So she scratched you.”
“Yes.”
My stomach twisted.
“You told me you were protecting her.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“By breaking into my mother’s apartment?”
“I believed the notebook would lead Sabine to you.”
“Did you take it?”
“No.”
The stranger laughed softly.
“Elise finally understood that both Voss brothers believed they had the right to control her.”
Lucan looked toward him.
“You killed her.”
“No.”
“You were driving the Lincoln.”
“No.”
“You sent me to the bakery.”
The stranger’s smile vanished.
“What?”
“You left the message telling me to meet Elise there.”
“I never sent it.”
For the first time, uncertainty appeared on the stranger’s face.
Lucan stepped closer.
“You thought I arranged the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you did.”
Both men looked toward Mr. Givens.
The old man began crying.
“I’m sorry.”
My skin turned cold.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I told Elise to meet Lucan.”
“Why?”
“Odette wanted them to reconcile.”
“You arranged the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Who knew?”
Givens looked toward the floor.
“Sabine.”
The stranger lowered the gun slightly.
“She followed Elise?”
“I don’t know.”
“You told Sabine?” Lucan shouted.
“She found the letter on Odette’s desk.”
The stranger turned away, breathing hard.
For twenty-two years, both brothers had believed the other arranged the trap.
Sabine had allowed them to blame each other.
I looked at the notebook in the stranger’s hand.
“Did you poison Mrs. Voss?”
His eyes returned to mine.
“No.”
“Did you frame me?”
“No.”
“Someone used my identification to buy the medicine.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because I followed the person who used it.”
“Who was it?”
Before he could answer, a floorboard creaked above us.
The stranger raised the pistol.
Lucan turned toward the stairs.
A woman appeared at the top.
Sabine.
She held Detective Ortiz’s gun against the detective’s neck.
Blood ran from Ortiz’s temple.
Two officers lay motionless behind them.
Sabine smiled down at us.
“Family reunions are always disappointing.”
The stranger aimed at her.
“You killed Mother.”
Sabine pressed the gun harder against Ortiz.
“Put yours down.”
“You first.”
Sabine looked at me.
“Merrick, tell your father to behave.”
“Which one?” I asked.
Her smile widened.
“That is the question, isn’t it?”
She pushed Detective Ortiz down the first step.
“Drop the gun, brother.”
The stranger slowly placed his pistol on the floor.
Sabine kicked it away when she reached the cellar.
“You escaped Saint Orison’s,” she said. “You survived the grave. You even survived Father.”
Her eyes hardened.
“But you could never resist proving that you existed.”
“You knew where I was the entire time.”
“Of course.”
“Did Mother?”
“For the last six years.”
Lucan looked stunned.
“She knew he was alive?”
Sabine nodded.
“That was the final secret she kept from you, Lucan.”
I thought of Mrs. Voss’s letter.
Lucan was not killed in the warehouse fire.
Perhaps she had not been referring to the man standing beside me.
Perhaps she had meant his twin.
Sabine moved toward Mr. Givens.
“You should have given me the package when I asked.”
Givens looked away.
She tore the wires from his chair and pushed him onto the floor.
There had never been a working trigger.
Only fear.
“Why kill your mother?” I asked.
“She transferred the house.”
“That’s all?”
“The house is worth less than the land beneath it.”
“What is beneath it?”
Sabine looked toward Lucan.
“Father never told you?”
“No.”
“Voss Family Press did not only produce restaurant menus and wedding invitations.”
The stranger’s face became still.
“What did they print?”
“Bond certificates. Bank drafts. Government forms.”
“Counterfeits,” Detective Ortiz whispered.
Sabine smiled.
“Millions of dollars’ worth.”
The hidden ledgers in Mercy proved theft from the family company.
But the true fortune had come from something far larger.
“Our father buried the original plates beneath Odette’s house,” Sabine continued. “Calder and Bram wanted to sell the property before anyone discovered them.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I wanted the plates.”
“Why?”
“They are still usable.”
Detective Ortiz stared at her.
“You poisoned your mother to continue a counterfeiting operation?”
“I poisoned an old woman who was about to destroy everything our family built.”
Lucan stepped forward.
“Our family built nothing.”
Sabine pointed the gun at his chest.
“You always were sentimental.”
The stranger moved subtly toward his pistol.
Sabine noticed.
“Do not.”
She looked at me.
“Bring me the deed and the blue-room key.”
“I don’t have them.”
“You’re wearing the key around your neck.”
My hand instinctively moved toward the chain.
Sabine smiled.
“Odette hid the entrance beneath Lucan’s bedroom.”
Lucan stared at her.
“The blue room?”
“The blue door was never meant to keep people out. It was meant to keep someone from noticing the floor.”
The stranger looked at me.
“Do not give it to her.”
Sabine turned the gun toward Detective Ortiz.
“One bullet.”
She looked toward Mr. Givens.
“Then another.”
Finally, she aimed at Lucan.
“And one for whichever father you decide you don’t need.”
I removed the chain.
“Let them go.”
“When I have the plates.”
I held out the key.
Sabine approached.
As she reached for it, the stranger kicked his pistol across the floor.
It slid beneath Mr. Givens’s chair.
Sabine fired.
The bullet struck Lucan in the side.
He collapsed.
I rushed toward him.
Detective Ortiz slammed her elbow into Sabine’s stomach. The gun discharged again, shattering a candleholder.
Mr. Givens grabbed the pistol beneath the chair.
The stranger threw himself at Sabine.
They crashed against the stone wall.
I pressed both hands against Lucan’s wound.
Blood soaked through his shirt.
“Stay with me.”
His fingers closed around my wrist.
“Merrick.”
“I’m here.”
“You need to know.”
“Don’t talk.”
“The DNA.”
Across the cellar, Detective Ortiz fought for control of Sabine’s gun.
The stranger pinned Sabine’s arm against the floor.
Lucan pulled me closer.
“I had a test done last year.”
“What test?”
“With a cup you used at the library.”
I stared at him.
“You stole my DNA?”
“I needed to know before I came to you.”
My hands were covered in his blood.
“And?”
His lips trembled.
“I’m not your father.”
The words entered me slowly.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
A gunshot echoed behind us.
The stranger cried out and fell away from Sabine.
She rose with blood on her sleeve but the gun still in her hand.
Lucan struggled to speak.
“My brother is.”
Sabine heard him.
She laughed.
“No, Lucan.”
Everyone looked at her.
“You always were easy to deceive.”
She wiped blood from her mouth.
“The laboratory compared Merrick with the wrong brother.”
Lucan’s eyes widened.
“What?”
Sabine pointed toward Calder and Bram’s old family photograph lying among the papers on the floor.
“There were never two identical sons.”
The stranger froze.
Sabine turned toward him.
“Tell them.”
He said nothing.
“Tell Merrick who you really are.”
Lucan stared at the man with his face.
The man’s expression slowly changed.
The grief disappeared.
The anger disappeared.
Even the familiar posture disappeared.
He reached toward the scar on his cheek.
Then he pulled.
The scar lifted from his skin.
A thin strip of prosthetic material came away in his fingers.
He removed the gray hairpiece next.
Beneath it, his hair was darker.
His face still resembled Lucan’s, but not perfectly.
Not enough to be his twin.
Lucan whispered one name.
“Calder.”
The man smiled.
The resemblance had been created with surgery, makeup, and years of preparation.
Calder Voss had escaped police custody by sending another man to impersonate him.
He had pretended to be the buried brother.
Pretended to be my father.
Pretended to be another victim.
“Where is the real Merrick?” I asked.
Calder looked toward Sabine.
For the first time, he appeared afraid.
Sabine raised the gun toward his head.
“Dead,” she said.
Calder shook his head.
“No.”
“You were supposed to make sure of it.”
Lucan gripped my sleeve.
“He survived.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he contacted Mother.”
Sabine’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“No more family secrets.”
Before she could fire, every candle in the cellar went out.
Darkness swallowed us.
Someone moved behind me.
A hand covered my mouth.
I was dragged toward a narrow opening in the stone wall.
I fought, but the person was stronger.
Behind us, Detective Ortiz shouted.
Another gunshot exploded.
Then the hidden passage closed.
I was pulled through complete darkness.
The hand left my mouth.
“Do not scream,” a man whispered.
His voice sounded nothing like Lucan’s.
Nothing like Calder’s.
A small light appeared.
The man holding me was thin and pale. A dark birthmark covered his left shoulder and climbed toward his neck.
He wore a chain around his wrist.
Hanging from it was a child’s hospital bracelet.
The faded name remained readable.
MERRICK VOSS.
He looked at me with eyes that matched my own.
“Your mother was right to name you after me,” he whispered.
“Are you my father?”
He placed my mother’s notebook in my hands.
“No.”
My heart stopped.
“Then who is?”
He turned toward the tunnel behind us as Sabine’s voice echoed through the stone.
“She is.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
He opened my mother’s notebook to the final page.
A hospital record had been folded inside it.
My name appeared beside the words INFANT ADOPTION—SEALED.
Below it, another name had been crossed out.
The biological mother’s name.
SABINE VOSS.
Before I could breathe, the hidden door behind us began to open.
And Sabine whispered from the darkness:
“Hello, son.”
LAST PART…
TO BE CONTINUED IN LAST PART…
