Chapter 11 - TEN SECONDS
Adrian fired at the balcony controls.
The theater plunged into darkness.
Valerie threw herself beneath Eleanor’s chair and jammed the counterfeit key into the pressure mechanism.
The timer reached three.
Then it stopped.
Smoke filled the balcony as Conrad disappeared through a private exit.
Adrian cut Eleanor free without lifting her weight from the plate.
Together they replaced the pressure with a steel equipment case.
The three of them escaped through the orchestra pit seconds before fire rolled across the stage.
Outside, Eleanor collapsed against Valerie.
“You gave him a copy.”
“Sebastian switched it before we left the tower.”
Adrian looked impressed.
“My brother is learning.”
Valerie called Sebastian.
A federal agent answered his phone.
At headquarters, Sebastian sat alone in an interrogation room.
The evidence against him was precise enough to feel supernatural.
Bank transfers linked him to Daniel Voss’s death.
Emails showed him ordering the raid on the pension fund.
A witness claimed he had met Conrad in Zurich three weeks earlier.
Sebastian had never been to Zurich.
The interrogator placed a photograph on the table.
It showed Sebastian entering a clinic there.
The man looked exactly like him.
“Who is that?” the agent asked.
Sebastian remembered the board’s claim that he was an impostor.
Then he remembered something his mother once said when he was a child.
You were born first, but you were never alone.
He had assumed she meant emotionally.
Now he understood.
“I have a twin.”
The door opened.
Margaret Sloan entered with federal credentials clipped to her jacket.
Sebastian stared at her.
“You are not my attorney.”
“No.”
She sat opposite him.
“I am the agent who recruited your mother thirty years ago.”
She pushed a second photograph toward him.
It showed two newborn boys in Eleanor Bennett’s arms.
One was Sebastian.
The other had a crown-shaped birthmark on his wrist.
May you like
“His name is Julian Vale,” Margaret said.
“And he has spent his entire life preparing to become you.”
