Chapter 2 - The Ghost of the East Wing
The heavy oak doors of Damon’s private study swung open with a slow, deliberate click.
Anton stepped inside first, his posture rigid, his eyes carefully avoiding Damon’s face. Behind him came Salvo, the estate manager, wringing his hands in a rare display of nervous friction. And trailing slightly behind them, looking smaller than her years, was the girl.
She hadn't fought when Anton gently escorted her out of the courtyard. She hadn't cried. She had simply let the massive Rottweiler—who had tried to follow her until Anton threatened it with a shock prod—stay behind at the terrace doors, whining softly like a puppy left in the rain.
Damon sat behind his vast mahogany desk. He didn't stand. He didn't loom. He simply folded his hands over the edge of the blotter and studied the child.
Up close, the illusion of fragility gave way to something sharper. Her eyes were an impossible, startling shade of amber—the exact color of the glass bottle Damon kept locked in his private liquor cabinet, or, more accurately, the exact color of the eyes belonging to the woman who had vanished from this very house three years and four months ago.
"What is your name?" Damon asked.
His voice was a low, measured baritone. It was the voice that made bankers in Frankfurt renegotiate debt percentages.
"Maya," the girl said.
She didn't look down. She looked right back at him, her chin tilted up just a fraction. It was an irritatingly familiar gesture.
"Maya what?" Damon asked.
"Just Maya."
Salvo shifted uncomfortably near the bookshelf. "Boss, we checked the exterior cameras. She didn't come through the front gates. She crawled under the perimeter drainage pipe near the old pump house. It’s overgrown with thornbushes. I don't know how a kid her size didn't get chewed up by the briars, let alone how she walked past the motion sensors."
"The sensors were recalibrated yesterday," Anton muttered defensively. "They should have picked up anything over forty pounds."
"She isn't forty pounds," Damon said quietly, his eyes never leaving the girl. "She's twenty-eight, perhaps thirty. And she didn't trigger the grid because she knows how the wires are laid."
The room went dead silent. Salvo blinked, his round face pale. "Boss? What do you mean?"
Damon stood up. He walked around the mahogany desk, his Tom Ford shoes clicking softly against the herringbone parquet floor. He stopped two feet away from Maya. She didn't flinch. She stood her ground, her small fingers clutching the frayed hem of her oversized yellow dress.
"Where did you learn the name you whispered to the dog?" Damon asked.
Maya tilted her head. "I didn't whisper it to a dog. I whispered it to the Warden. But his real name isn't the Warden."
"No," Damon said, his voice dropping an octave, the temperature in the room seeming to plunge several degrees. "It isn't."
"My mama told me," Maya said softly, the defiance in her voice flickering for a fraction of a second, replaced by a child's hollow exhaustion. "She said if I ever got lost, and if I ever found the big black dog with the white star on his chest, I had to tell him she was still looking for him."
Damon stared at her. The air in the study felt thick, difficult to draw into his lungs.
Three years ago, Elena Vance—an archivist he had hired to catalog his grandfather’s recovered diaries—had walked out of the Castellano estate in the middle of a November gale and never returned. No body. No bank withdrawals. No digital footprint. Just an empty room in the East Wing and a locked diary that Damon had spent thirty-six months trying to crack.
She had left behind nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Except, as Damon was now realizing with terrifying clarity, she hadn't left empty-handed at all.
"Salvo," Damon said without turning around.
"Yes, Boss?"
"Clear the estate. Send every guard to the perimeter. I want the woods searched within a three-mile radius. Bring me everyone, every vehicle, every camp within fifty miles."
Salvo hesitated. "Boss, you think she walked here alone?"
May you like
Damon looked down at Maya’s mud-caked shoes, then up at the amber eyes that mirrored a ghost he had tried for three years to bury.
"Nobody walks through that forest alone," Damon said softly, his jaw set like granite. "Someone brought her here. And I want to know who’s watching from the tree line."
