Chapter 2 - The Safe House
We ran for three blocks before I dared to flag down a passing taxi. I gave the driver an address in downtown LA, an old converted loft owned by the only person I could trust: Marcus.
Marcus was an ex-LAPD detective turned private investigator. He had helped me navigate the messy legal aftermath of Julian's sudden disappearance three years ago. If anyone could understand the madness I had just uncovered, it was him.
It was 4:30 a.m. when I pounded on his heavy steel door. He answered in sweatpants, a baseball bat in one hand, his eyes bleary. When he saw Lily shivering in my arms and the wild look in my eyes, he dropped the bat and pulled us inside.
"Sarah? What the hell is going on?" he asked, locking the three deadbolts behind us.
I didn't say a word. I set Lily on his leather sofa, wrapping her in a warm blanket he brought out. Once she was asleep, exhausted by the sheer terror of the night, I pulled the SD card from my pocket and slammed it onto his kitchen island.
"Julian is alive," I said, my voice trembling. "And the woman he married is a fraud. She's keeping him captive, Marcus. And her men just kicked down my front door."
Marcus’s professional instincts instantly took over. He grabbed his laptop, plugged in the SD card, and watched the video. The color drained from his face as Julian's skeletal, terrified face appeared on the screen.
"My god," Marcus whispered. "That's Julian? He looks like a prisoner of war."
"Look at the other file," I urged.
He opened the image of the passport. Mary-Ann Hodges.
Marcus started typing furiously, pulling up restricted databases he still had access to from his LAPD days. "Victoria Sterling. Heiress to a billion-dollar real estate empire. Her parents died in a plane crash ten years ago, leaving her everything. But she’s notoriously reclusive. Rarely photographed without sunglasses or heavy makeup."
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He hit a final keystroke, and a decades-old arrest record from Arkansas popped up. A mugshot of a young, hard-faced woman who looked exactly like the billionaire heiress.
"Mary-Ann Hodges," Marcus read the screen. "Arrested for identity theft and wire fraud in 2012. She vanished after making bail. Sarah... she didn't just marry Julian. She stole Victoria Sterling's entire life. And Julian must have found out."
