Chapter 11 - THE GHOST OF STERLING MANOR
The morning air in the Rockies was crisp, carrying the scent of pine and wet earth, a stark contrast to the suffocating, climate-controlled sterility of Sterling Manor. Maya Sterling sat at her wooden desk, the morning sunlight catching the silver threads in her hair—threads she no longer dyed to please Daniel. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, her publisher begging for a follow-up to *Bones That Speak*, but her mind was tangled in the past.
Six months had passed since Daniel’s second appeal was rejected. He was currently serving a fifteen-year sentence at a maximum-security facility in upstate New York, stripped of his bespoke suits, his board seats, and his illusion of untouchability. Yet, like a phantom limb, his presence still lingered in the corners of her mind.
Her phone buzzed, breaking the silence of the cottage. An unknown number with a New York area code.
Maya frowned, sliding her thumb across the screen. "Hello?"
"Mrs. Sterling," a sharp, unfamiliar voice echoed through the speaker. It belonged to a woman, tense and clipped. "Or should I call you Maya? My name is Cynthia Vance. No relation to Eleanor, unfortunately. I’m Daniel’s current cellblock neighbor's court-appointed investigator."
Maya’s breath hitched. She hadn't heard Daniel's name spoken aloud in weeks. "I’m divorced from Daniel Sterling. Whatever business you have with him has nothing to do with me."
"It has everything to do with you," Cynthia interrupted, her tone urgent. "Daniel hasn't accepted his sentence, Maya. He’s playing a very long game. He managed to smuggle a letter out through a corrupt guard. It didn’t go to his lawyers. It went to a storage unit in Stamford, Connecticut—one registered under your maiden name that he apparently kept active."
Maya stood up so fast her chair scraped loudly against the hardwood floor. "How would he even know about that unit? I closed everything years ago."
"He didn't close it. He *funded* it, using a shell company you knew nothing about," Cynthia said grimly. "And today, the facility management called my office because the auto-payment failed due to his frozen assets. They’re about to drill the locks and auction off the contents. Maya... you might want to get down there. There’s something in that unit that Daniel was willing to kill to keep hidden. And I don't just mean what happened on the stairs."
May you like
The room seemed to spin. The peace she had fought so hard to build suddenly felt like a thin sheet of ice over a freezing lake. Daniel wasn't just rotting in a cell; he was reaching out from the grave, pulling her back into the nightmare she thought she had escaped.
***
