Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Val-d'Isère
Seraphina pulled the torn edges of her dress over her shoulder, her hands shaking violently. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Val-d'Isère," Elias murmured, ignoring her defense completely. His eyes were wide, unblinking, haunted by a phantom from two decades past. "Winter of 2006. The chalet in the mountains. The fire."
"My name is Seraphina Hayes," she insisted, her voice breaking. "I was raised in Kingston!"
"You were raised in an orphanage in Kingston because someone forged your intake papers!" Elias snapped, stepping back and running both hands through his slicked-back hair, visibly unravelling for the first time in his life. "That scar was left by a French prototype incendiary bullet. Only five rifles were built with that precise barrel rifling. My father owned three of them."
Seraphina fell silent, her chest heaving as memories she had buried for twenty years threatened to breach the surface of her mind.
Smokeless powder. Snow stained with bright crimson blood. A mother pushing her underneath a burning floorboard into the sub-zero snowbank outside.
"You're... Valerie," Elias whispered, staring at her as if looking at a ghost returned from the grave. "Valerie Laurent. The daughter of my father's business partner."
"I am a nanny," Seraphina insisted, tears finally brimming in her dark eyes. "I came here for a job. I needed money for my mother's medicine!"
"The woman you call your mother was paid to keep you quiet!" Elias spat, leaning over the table, his composure entirely shattered. "Twenty years ago, my father gave an order to wipe out the entire Laurent bloodline to consolidate our shipping routes through the Riviera. I stood on the hill outside that burning chalet when I was fourteen years old. I watched them clear the bodies."
He looked at her tear-stained face, his jaw working as realization settled into his soul like lead.
"They told my father the little girl died in the primary explosion," Elias continued softly. "They showed him a charred necklace. They lied to him... or someone smuggled you out."
Seraphina hugged her arms around her chest, shivering in the cold basement room. "If your father ordered my family killed, then you're going to kill me now to finish his work."
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Elias looked at her, his dark gray eyes turning darker, cold steel mixing with a sudden, dangerous resolve.
"My father died five years ago, Valerie," Elias said, his voice turning into a quiet promise. "And I spent my entire youth hating every single thing he built."
