Chapter 43 - The Will of Arthur Vance
The speedometer needle hovered past eighty miles per hour as the heavy truck hydroplaned through standing water on Harbor Drive. The headlights of Duluth Memorial Hospital loomed in the distance through the sheets of rain like a glowing, modern fortress.
David’s heart was being torn in two. Every nerve ending screamed at him to spin the wheel, turn north onto Route 61, and chase that black SUV until he rammed it off the edge of the cliffs into Lake Superior. But he glanced at Leah. Her skin was turning the color of wet parchment; her lips had lost all color.
"I'm not letting you die," he snarled through clenched teeth. "I won't let her take you too."
He slammed the truck onto the emergency bay ramp, tires screeching as he mounted the concrete curb and came to a shuddering halt directly in front of the sliding automatic glass doors. He leaped from the cab, kicked the glass doors open, and roared into the sterile, fluorescent triage area: "TRAUMA! GUNSHOT AND STAB WOUND! SHE'S IN HYPOVOLEMIC SHOCK!"
Within five seconds, three nurses and an ER physician swarmed the truck. David lifted Leah’s limp form onto the gurney. The team descended on her like a pit crew, cutting away the rest of her clothes, slapping cardiac monitor pads onto her chest, and shoving two large-bore IVs into her forearms.
"BP is 60 over 40 and dropping!" a nurse yelled. "She’s coding! Page the trauma surgeon to OR 3 right now!"
"David..." Leah’s lips barely moved as the gurney began moving rapidly toward the double doors of the surgical wing. Her hand fell off the edge of the mattress.
"I’m getting her back, Leah," David whispered, leaning over the rail, his tears hitting her cold cheek. "I swear on my soul, I am bringing our daughter home."
The double doors slammed shut. David was left standing in the white, blinding hallway, soaked to the bone in lake water and his wife's blood.
A security guard approached cautiously, hand resting near his holster, eyeing David's blood-soaked clothes and wild eyes. "Sir, you need to sit down. The police have been notified—"
"Back off," David said, his voice dropping into a register so dark and lethal that the guard instinctively took two steps backward.
David reached into his pocket and pulled out the small leather-bound notebook he had taken from Arthur’s dead body before fleeing the silo. He opened the water-resistant cover under the harsh hospital lighting.
Tucked into the interior pocket was a digital micro-SD card and a folded document bearing the gold wax seal of the Vance Family Trust.
David unfolded the paper. It was a certified psychiatric assessment report from the Menninger Clinic, dated thirty-two years ago—six months before David was born.
His eyes scanned down the faded typewritten lines:
*Patient: Evelyn Vance (née Thorne).*
*Diagnosis: Severe narcissistic personality disorder with psychopathic violent tendencies. Induced factitious disorder.*
*Finding: Patient exhibits profound detachment from reality regarding family lineage. Patient is physically incapable of full-term gestation due to bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy performed in 1989.*
David froze. His breath hitched. His eyes re-read the sentence three times.
*Physically incapable of gestation.*
Taped beneath the document was a black-and-white hospital birth certificate from Cook County, Illinois.
*Infant: Male.*
*Mother: Unknown Jane Doe (Deceased).*
*Father: Arthur Vance.*
*Adoptive Mother: Evelyn Vance.*
David’s entire reality shattered. Evelyn was not his biological mother.
The woman who had terrorized his childhood, who had beaten him, starved him, locked him in dark cellars to "purify his character," who had spent twenty-five years obsessing over his bloodline—she had stolen him. She had taken a dead girl’s baby to maintain her grip on the Vance dynasty's seventy-million-dollar empire.
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And now, she had Maya.
***
