THAT GIRL LIVED WITH ME AT THE ORPHANAGE,” SHE CRIES AFTER SEEING A PORTRAIT IN THE MANSION

PART 2

“Because, sir… that girl lived with me in the orphanage.”

Victor Aliance stopped breathing.

For twenty-eight years, the portrait of his little sister Helena had been his punishment, the only place she still existed, six years old forever, with her blue-gray eyes like the sea before a storm. He had stood beneath it every night for almost three decades, whispering the secret name only he had called her. Lena of the sea. He had built an empire as a monument to a single promise made by a fourteen-year-old boy who had stayed home for a mathematics lesson while his sister vanished from a park.

And now a maid stood pale in the moonlit corridor and told him that the girl in the portrait had not died.

“That’s impossible,” Victor said, though his voice had no conviction. “Helena disappeared twenty-eight years ago. There was a search. The whole country looked. There was never any trace.”

“I don’t know about a search,” Kiara whispered. “I only know that when I was a little girl, in an orphanage in the south, far from the capital, there was an older girl who looked after the younger ones. She had blue-gray eyes. She had a smile exactly like that one.” She nodded toward the portrait, tears streaming down her face. “She didn’t know her real name. She’d been told she was abandoned. But she used to say a strange thing, when she was sad. She used to say a name to herself, like a prayer. She called herself Lena of the sea.”

Victor’s legs nearly gave out. He gripped the edge of a side table.

No one knew that name. No one. It had been a secret folded inside childhood, a thing only he and Helena had shared, the name he had whispered to her when she was small. It had never been in a newspaper, never in a police report, never spoken aloud to anyone in twenty-eight years.

“Say it again,” he breathed.

“Lena of the sea,” Kiara said. “That’s what she called herself when she thought no one was listening. I never understood it. But I never forgot it. And then I came here, and I saw that painting, and I, I knew. The eyes. The smile. The name. Sir, the girl in that portrait grew up. She grew up in the orphanage where I lived. She didn’t die in that park. Someone took her, and she ended up in the system, with no name, hundreds of miles from home.”

Victor Aliance, the lonely king of the capital, the billionaire who had turned grief into discipline and discipline into empire, sank slowly to his knees beneath his sister’s portrait.

“She’s alive,” he whispered. “Lena is alive.”

“I don’t know if she still is,” Kiara said gently, kneeling beside him. “I lost touch with her when I was young. But she was alive, Mr. Aliance. The girl in that painting lived. I promise you. I knew her.”