Chapter 6 - Shadows of the Past
Dante took the phone from Pierre’s hand, staring intently at the archival photograph before turning his gaze back to Aurora.
“Aurora Vane,” Dante said softly, testing the name on his tongue.
She flinched at the sound of her real name, as if it were a physical object that carried immense danger. Her hand flew up to cover the butterfly mark on her collarbone, her breathing accelerating into rapid, panicked gasps.
“Hey,” Dante said, his voice dropping into a firm, reassuring tone. He stepped closer, kneeling beside the wash chair so he was at eye level with her. “Look at me.”
Aurora slowly shifted her gaze to him. In the depths of her dark violet eyes, Dante saw not madness, but a deep, profound terror—and an extraordinary intelligence that had been locked behind a wall of trauma for nearly a decade.
“They… they think I’m dead,” she whispered, her voice rough and gravelly, like dry leaves scraping against pavement. “If they know… if they find out I survived… they will finish it.”
“Who?” Dante asked coldly.
“The trust…” she breathed, her small body trembling uncontrollably under the warm towels. “Uncle Richard… the boat didn't explode by accident, Dante. The engines were cut. The doors were locked from the outside. I only made it out because the blast threw me into the ocean…”
Dante’s eyes narrowed into slits of dark steel. The puzzle pieces were falling into place with terrifying clarity.
Richard Vane, the paternal uncle who had taken control of the Vane Maritime Empire as sole trustee after Aurora’s presumed death, was one of Manhattan’s most respected philanthropists—and quietly, one of the biggest financiers of organized crime in the Tri-State area. In fact, Richard Vane had recently been negotiating a massive shipping port deal with Dante’s own rivals—the very men who had set up the ambush at Pier 42 earlier that morning.
The attack on Dante and the survival of Aurora were not isolated incidents. They were two ends of the same blood-stained thread.
“You dragged yourself out of the water,” Dante murmured, piecing together her lost decade.
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“I was washed ashore near Montauk,” she whispered, looking down at her hands. “I was terrified. I saw his face on the news, mourning me, taking control of everything. I realized if I went to the police, his money would find me before I made it to a courtroom. So I became nothing. I became trash. If you look like dirt, people look away. If you don't speak, nobody listens.”
She had hidden herself in plain sight, allowing her body to rot beneath the city's neglect, growing a two-meter cage of hair to obscure her face, choosing the cold, brutal safety of the streets over the deadly luxury of her former life.
