Chapter 4 - THE STERLING TRUST
I didn’t trust him. But the men rushing down my apartment stairs left me no choice.
I got into Hayes’s battered Ford. We tore out of the alley just as two black SUVs swerved onto my street.
“Who sent you?” I demanded, clutching my bag to my chest as we merged onto the highway.
“Your mother,” Hayes said, keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. “Twenty-six years ago. She paid a retainer to my father’s law firm. When he passed, the file went to me. The instruction was simple: If the Vance family ever made a move on Elena, get her out.”
“Why me? Why my land?”
Hayes let out a bitter laugh. “It’s not just land, Elena. The forty-three acres? That’s just the gate.”
He pulled the truck into a deserted diner parking lot on the edge of the county line. He turned off the engine and looked at me.
“Jonathan Sterling didn’t just own a few acres. He owned the holding company that built the Vance empire. St. Jude Manor. The hotels. The commercial districts. They all sit on land leased from the Sterling Trust.”
My mind spun. “Leased?”
“A ninety-nine-year lease,” Hayes explained softly. “With a morality clause and a reversion trigger. When your father died in a suspicious car accident twenty-five years ago, Victoria Vance assumed control of the empire. But she couldn’t find the master deeds to the Trust. She couldn’t legally own the ground her empire was built on.”
“My mother had them.”
“Your mother hid them,” Hayes corrected. “Victoria has spent two decades leveraging properties she doesn’t actually own. That’s the debt. The banks are finally asking for proof of the master deeds. If Victoria can’t produce them, the Vance empire collapses overnight.”
I stared out the window. The betrayal settled deep into my bones.
Julian hadn’t just been trying to steal my mother’s land. He was trying to steal the keys to his own kingdom. If I had signed that paper, I would have signed away the very ground his family stole from my father.
“We need to find the deeds,” I said.
Hayes nodded. “Where would your mother hide them?”
I opened the journal. I flipped past the entries about the poisoned soil and the hidden seed. I stopped on a page that had a child’s drawing tucked inside it.
I pulled it out. I had drawn it when I was six. A picture of a giant oak tree, a greenhouse, and a small dog.
But my mother had written three numbers on the back of my childhood drawing.
14 - 82 - 9.
“These aren’t combinations,” I whispered, recognizing the format. “They’re coordinates. They map to the old grid of the Ross property.”
Hayes started the truck. “Then we go to the woods.”
From the back seat, a small, sleepy voice murmured. “Dad? Are we there yet?”
I jumped. I turned around and saw a little girl, maybe seven years old, curled up under a plaid blanket. She rubbed her eyes, looking at me with absolute innocence.
“This is Lily,” Hayes said quietly. “Her mother passed away three years ago. I couldn’t leave her with a sitter. Not with the Vances watching me.”
Lily sat up, clutching a stuffed rabbit. She looked at my messy hair and my stained hands.
“Are you a princess?” she asked. “You have a sparkly thing in your ear.”
I reached up. I was still wearing my mother’s pearl and diamond earrings.
I smiled gently at the little girl. “No, sweetie. I’m just a gardener.”
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
It was a text from Julian.
May you like
You think you can run, Elena? Your bank accounts are frozen. The police are looking for the stolen earrings you’re wearing. Come back. Don’t make me destroy you.
I looked at the text. Then I turned off the phone and threw it out the window.
