Chapter 9 - The Ghost of the Past
The silence that followed Nora's words was heavier than the freezing snow around them.
Dominic stared at her, the rigid control of his features finally slipping.
"What are you saying?" he demanded, his voice dangerously quiet.
Nora struggled to her feet, shivering uncontrollably.
"Silas said I was a prototype," she explained, pacing frantically in the snow.
"They erased my memory."
"They branded me."
She looked directly into Dominic's eyes.
"But what if they did more than just erase who I was?"
"What if they reconstructed me to look like someone else?"
"To look like Emily?"
Dominic stepped forward, grabbing her by the shoulders.
"That's impossible," he stated firmly, though the desperation in his voice betrayed him.
"You can't reconstruct a face to perfectly match someone else."
"Not flawlessly."
"Not without obvious surgical scars."
Nora touched the faint, jagged line on her left cheek.
"Unless the scars were disguised as injuries," she countered.
"Like a bad car accident."
"Or an attack in an alley."
The blood drained from Dominic's face as the horrifying logic settled in.
"If you are the prototype designed to look like my sister..."
He let her go, stepping back as if she suddenly terrified him.
"Then who is the woman who walked into the bank?"
"She's the finished product," Nora answered softly.
"The perfect copy."
"The one sent to infiltrate your father's vault because the real Emily is either dead or unreachable."
Dominic turned away, pressing his hands hard against his temples.
He paced in the snow, his breath pluming in the icy air.
"We need to find her," he finally said, his voice hard as steel once more.
"If she has the ledger, she's the only leverage we have against both Rourke and the Syndicate."
He pulled out a second, smaller burner phone from his pocket.
He quickly dialed a number.
"I need a trace on the tracker I slipped into the spine of the ledger before I put it in the vault," Dominic ordered the moment the line connected.
He listened for a moment, then hung up.
"She's at an abandoned shipping yard in Red Hook," he told Nora.
"We're going."
They hiked out of the woods and found the muscle car exactly where they had hidden it.
Dominic drove like a man possessed, tearing down the empty highways back toward the city.
The sky was beginning to lighten with the pale gray of dawn when they reached the Brooklyn waterfront.
The shipping yard was a maze of rusted containers and broken concrete.
Dominic parked two blocks away, and they moved silently through the freezing shadows.
They located a small, corrugated metal office building near the water's edge.
A faint light glowed from a window on the second floor.
Dominic drew his weapon and signaled Nora to stay close.
They crept up the rusted iron stairs, the metal groaning softly under their weight.
Dominic kicked the door open, his gun raised and ready to fire.
The woman who looked exactly like Nora was sitting at a scarred wooden desk.
She was calmly reading the thick, leather-bound ledger.
She didn't flinch when the door burst open.
She simply closed the book and looked up.
Her face was identical to Nora's, flawless and unscarred.
But her eyes were entirely different.
They were cold, dead, and utterly terrifying.
"You're late, Dominic," the woman said, her voice smooth and devoid of any accent.
Dominic kept his gun trained directly on her chest.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
The woman smiled softly, a chilling expression on a familiar face.
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"I am the weapon your father built," she answered calmly.
"And I'm the one who is going to burn his empire to the ground."
