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

PART 3

Victor did not sleep again that night, or for many nights after.

He mobilized everything. The same resources he had once poured into the fruitless search for a missing six-year-old, he now turned toward finding the woman that six-year-old had become. But this time he had something he had never had before: a thread. An orphanage in the south. A timeframe. A witness who had known her. And the secret name, Lena of the sea, that proved beyond any doubt that the girl Kiara remembered was his sister.

The investigation was painstaking. Records from rural orphanages decades old were incomplete, sometimes lost, sometimes deliberately obscured. But Victor was relentless, and his resources were vast, and slowly the picture assembled itself.

Helena had not wandered off in that park twenty-eight years ago. She had been taken. A trafficking operation, the kind that preyed on children in crowded public places, had snatched her in the minute the babysitter looked away. But something had gone wrong with whatever they intended, and the child had ended up, frightened and nameless, abandoned at an orphanage hundreds of miles from the capital, too young and too traumatized to tell anyone who she really was. She had grown up there, in the system, believing she had been abandoned by parents who did not want her, never knowing that in fact she had been stolen from a family that had never stopped grieving her.

For Victor, each new piece of the truth was both a relief and a fresh wound. For twenty-eight years he had not known what happened to his sister, and the not-knowing had been its own particular torture, a wound that could never close because it had no edges. Now, finally, he was learning the edges of it. And the edges were terrible. He learned that while he and his parents lived in their grand mansion, grieving, searching, offering rewards large enough to change a working family’s life, his little sister had been growing up in poverty in an orphanage, believing herself abandoned, unwanted, forgotten. He learned that the years his family had spent looking for her had been years she had spent feeling unloved, never knowing that an entire family was tearing itself apart over her absence. The cruelty of it, the sheer waste of it, twenty-eight years in which a brother and a sister had each been suffering the other’s loss in different cities, unable to find each other, was almost more than Victor could bear. But it also drove him forward, because every detail he uncovered brought him one step closer to the moment he had promised, at fourteen, to bring about. The moment he found her.

She had grown up. She had aged out of the orphanage. And then the trail, for a while, went cold.

But Victor did not stop. He had spent twenty-eight years and an entire empire on a promise. He was not going to stop now that the promise was finally, impossibly, within reach.

And at last, after months of searching, he found her.

She was living in another city, under a name that was not Helena, a name the orphanage had given a nameless child. She was in her thirties now. She had built a quiet, modest life, a life shaped by the particular loneliness of a person who believes they came from nowhere, who has no history, no family, no roots. She worked an ordinary job. She had no idea that she was Helena Aliance, that she had a brother who had spent his life looking for her, that there was a mansion with her childhood portrait on the wall, that her family had been wealthy and devastated and searching for her for almost three decades.

Victor went to her himself. He did not send lawyers or investigators. He went himself, the brother who had stayed home for a mathematics lesson, who had been fourteen and had promised to protect her, who had carried that broken promise for twenty-eight years.

He brought the portrait.