Chapter 21: Marcus Investigates Ellie
Marcus did not sleep after the Valestar board meeting, because one sentence kept returning like a hand closing around his throat.
Sit down. You are not a shareholder.
The voice had come from a black screen, filtered by distance, darkness, and legal caution. Still, something inside it touched an old nerve.
Not memory. Worse. Recognition.
His lawyer said the board had acted within procedure, and Marcus hated the phrase more than any accusation.
Within procedure meant someone had learned to hurt him with rules he could not buy, charm, or threaten away.
At seven, he called the private investigator he had used twice before, a man who never asked whether marriages were happy before following wives.
That was why Marcus kept his number.
“I need everything on a consultant at Valestar,” Marcus said. “Name?” “Ellie Cross.” “How soon?” “Yesterday.”
By noon, the file arrived, and Marcus knew it was wrong before he reached the photographs.
It was too clean. Clean files were never innocent.
Ellie Cross had a polished CV, private clients, no public photographs, and references who answered with expensive discretion.
Invented. Protected. Or both.
Marcus opened the photographs first: Ellie Cross entering Valestar, leaving Valestar, buying black coffee near the office.
Plain coat. Pinned brown hair. No jewellery. No drama.
The kind of woman people forgot until she had already read every weakness in the room.
Marcus zoomed in on her face.
The mouth was wrong. The hair was wrong. The posture was wrong.
Elena used to move like a woman trained to apologise for taking space, shoulders measured, silence rehearsed.
This woman moved like she had stopped apologising and found it profitable.
That should have reassured him. It did the opposite.
He clicked the next image.
Ellie Cross stood near Valestar’s lift, holding a file against her chest. Her sleeve had slipped half an inch above her glove.
There, at the wrist, was a red mark.
A healing cut. Not old. Not decorative.
Rock, Marcus thought before he could stop himself.
Sea rock.
His hand tightened around the mouse. “No.”
The office did not answer.
He enlarged the image until the scar blurred into pixels, then sharpened again in his mind.
It could be anything: a kitchen accident, a fall, a careless door, one of the ordinary injuries ordinary women collected.
But Marcus did not believe in coincidences when they arrived exactly where he was bleeding.
He scrolled back to the board transcript, to the black screen, to the sentence that had made his lawyer sit down.
That voice had not been Elena’s voice, not exactly.
It had been something older than sound: rhythm, timing, the clean cruelty of a woman who knew where the nerve was.
His phone rang. Sophia.
He answered softly, because soft voices made better traps. “Darling.”
Sophia sounded tired. “We need to discuss Victor.”
“No,” Marcus said. “We need to discuss your consultant.”
A pause. “Ellie?”
“Where did you find her?” “Through a recruiter.”
“Which recruiter?”
“Marcus, the board just suspended my CFO.” “Answer me.”
Sophia went quiet, and there was control in that quiet. He hated it more than refusal.
“Why are you asking?”
Because your consultant may be my dead wife, he almost said.
Instead, he chose the safer lie. “Because she is not who she says she is.”
Sophia breathed once. “Who is?” The line went dead.
Marcus stared at the scar until it stopped being a wound and became a warning.
If Elena was alive, she had entered Valestar, touched Sophia’s board, removed Victor, and made his lawyer obey a screen.
If she was not alive, someone had learned to imitate her well enough to reach into his bones. Neither answer let him sleep. Then he sent one instruction to the investigator: Get me close enough to see her wrist.