Chapter 12 - THE SISTER WHO DISAPPEARED|
Mila did not answer her phone.
Nadia called six times before Theodore ordered Marcus to check the security cameras around the apartment where Mila had been staying. The footage showed her leaving the building at 3:12 p.m. with a man wearing a gray coat.
She did not return.
Theodore dispatched his security team while Nadia struggled to keep herself from panicking.
“She wouldn't sign anything against me,” Nadia insisted. “Mila knows what we went through.”
“Victor wants you to believe she betrayed you,” Theodore said. “That doesn't mean she did.”
“He has a document with her signature.”
“Documents can be forged. People can be coerced.”
Nadia stopped pacing.
“You think he took her?”
“I think we need to find her before we decide what happened.”
Theodore contacted the police, but Victor's influence complicated the search. Within an hour, a senior official called to suggest that Mila might have left voluntarily. The suggestion was accompanied by a warning that Theodore's private security operations were attracting unwanted attention.
He ended the call before the man could finish.
By midnight, Marcus had traced the gray-coated man to a private clinic outside Newark. The building was registered to a company owned by one of Victor's shell corporations.
Theodore and Nadia arrived with a police contact they trusted.
They found Mila in a locked office, frightened but unharmed.
The moment Nadia embraced her, Mila began to cry.
“He told me you were going to prison,” she whispered. “He said if I signed the statement, he would make sure you could leave the country safely.”
“Did you sign it?”
Mila nodded miserably.
“I thought I was protecting you.”
Nadia held her tighter.
“You don't ever have to protect me by hurting yourself.”
Theodore entered the room.
“Who told you to bring her here?”
Mila pointed toward the desk.
A telephone sat beside a glass of water. Its screen showed a recent call from an unregistered number.
Marcus traced it to Victor's private office.
But the most important discovery came from a folder on the desk. Inside were medical reports, financial records, and a photograph of Nadia as a child standing beside her adoptive father.
The file included details about her parents' deaths.
Their car accident had not been investigated thoroughly because the other vehicle had disappeared. The insurance claim had been settled through a company linked to the Hawthorne Foundation.
Nadia read the report with growing horror.
“My parents didn't just adopt me. They knew something.”
Mila shook her head.
“They loved you. They never said anything about the Hawthornes.”
“Perhaps they were trying to keep us safe.”
Theodore examined the paperwork.
“There are payments to the investigating officer. Someone made sure the accident stayed closed.”
Nadia looked up.
“Victor?”
“Possibly. We need proof.”
As they prepared to leave, Mila noticed a handwritten message tucked into the back of the file.
The second witness is still alive. Find the woman who drove the car.
Nadia turned to Theodore.
“The woman who caused the accident?”
“Or the woman who witnessed it.”
Marcus checked the date on the report.
The accident had occurred twelve years earlier.
He searched the vehicle records and found a name associated with the missing car.
Rebecca Sloane.
Victor's daughter.
The woman had disappeared from public life after a highly publicized family dispute.
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According to the last official record, she had been declared dead six years earlier.
But someone had recently used her passport to cross the Canadian border.
