Present Day – Zurich
The pristine silence of the Sanatorium Alpenruhe was a lie. Elara felt
it in her bones as she and Silas prepared for their tour. The truth Greta had
shared the night before hung between them, a spectre more substantial than the
mountain mist. The woman they were going to see was not just a patient, or a
secret, or even Julian's mother. She was the ghost at the very beginning of the
feast—the original sin.
To understand the precipice they were about to step onto, Elara needed
to see it. Not through documents or second-hand whispers, but through the
hearts of the people who lived it. As dawn broke, she sat with the weight of
Greta's story, and her mind, against her will, began to paint the tragedy in
vivid, devastating strokes.
Flashback – The Cohen Estate, 1978
The house was a masterpiece of cold elegance, a museum where Arthur
Cohen curated his perfect life. His wife, Elora, was its most beautiful,
fragile object. She moved through the marble halls like a whisper, her ethereal
beauty masking a spirit slowly suffocating under the weight of expectation and
Arthur's polite, exacting indifference. She was expected to produce an heir,
but years had yielded only silence and Arthur's mounting, silent disapproval.
Then there was Steven.
Where Arthur was granite, Steven was wildfire. He blew into the house
with laughter, reckless charm, and a restless energy that made the crystal
chandeliers seem to tremble. He saw Elora—not as a duty or a decorative piece,
but as a fellow captive. He saw the loneliness in her eyes, the unspoken poetry
in her stillness.
Their affair began in stolen moments: a brush of hands in the library, a
shared glance across the formal dinner table that lasted a second too long,
clandestine meetings in the rose garden after dark. For Elora, Steven was
oxygen. For Steven, Elora was the only beautiful, true thing in a world of
gilded corruption. He loved her with a fierce, desperate passion that ignored
consequences. She loved him back, and in doing so, began to truly live for the
first time.
"We'll run away," Steven whispered against her hair one autumn evening,
the scent of decaying leaves and hope in the air. "To somewhere he can never
touch us."
But before plans could be made, life intervened. Elora missed her cycle.
The joy she felt was immediately poisoned by a terror so profound it made her
ill. This child, conceived in love, was a death sentence to their secret and a
weapon that could shatter the Cohen dynasty.
Arthur knew before she could form the words. He noticed the change in
her, the new softness followed by paralysing fear. His investigation was swift,
silent, and merciless. When he confronted them in his study, his rage was not a
fire, but an absolute zero.
"You are a disease in my house," he said to his brother, his voice
quieter than a razor. "And you," he turned to Elora, his gaze stripping her
soul bare, "are the flawed vessel. This ends now."
The cover-up was a masterpiece of cold-blooded efficiency. Elora was
declared "unwell"—nerves shattered by the pressure of her duties. A private
villa in the Swiss countryside was prepared, far from prying eyes. She was
spirited away in the night, with only a stern, silent nurse for company. To the
world, the first Mrs. Cohen was taking a prolonged restorative retreat.
Steven was banished, his assets threatened, his every move monitored.
Arthur made it clear: if he tried to contact her, tried to interfere, Elora
would pay the price in ways Steven could not imagine.
The Swiss Chalet, 1979
Elora's pregnancy was a season of isolated joy and profound terror. The
child grew within her, a living testament to a love that felt like a dream in
her sterile, guarded waking life. Steven managed, through a bribed
groundskeeper, to get a single letter to her. It was filled with promises,
plans, and a raw, aching love. She slept with it under her pillow.
The birth was long and difficult, devoid of the love that had created
the child. In a sterile, private clinic wing, with only the cold-eyed doctor
and the nurse in attendance, Julian entered the world. Elora held him for
exactly forty-seven minutes. She memorised the curve of his cheek, the
surprising grip of his tiny hand around her finger, the scent of his skin.
"My love," she whispered, tears streaming into his wisps of dark hair.
"My beautiful, impossible boy."
Then the door opened. Arthur stood there, immaculate in a charcoal coat,
the Swiss winter clinging to his shoulders. He didn't look at Elora. He looked
at the baby.
"It's time," was all he said.
The nurse, with practiced, pitiless hands, took Julian from Elora's
trembling arms. Elora's cry was a raw, animal thing that echoed off the tiled
walls. "Please! He's mine! He's Steven's!"
"He is a Cohen," Arthur corrected, his voice flat. "That is all that
will ever matter. You have given the family an heir. Your purpose is served."
She was told the child was weak, had complications, had not survived. A
death certificate was even prepared. But as the weeks of a crushing, medicated
grief bled into months, whispers from a sympathetic young orderly seeped
through the fog. The baby had thrived. He had been taken to Zurich, then to
America. He lived.
The knowledge broke something fundamental in Elora. The lie was more
crushing than the loss. They had not only stolen her child; they had tried to
steal the truth of his existence. Her grief curdled into a silent, resilient
madness. She refused to eat, refused to speak, haunted the halls of the clinic
staring at other children.
Arthur's solution was final. Her instability was now genuine, and
conveniently permanent. Papers were signed. The first Mrs. Elora Cohen was
legally eased into oblivion. The elegant, accomplished Eleanor Vance was
introduced as the new Mrs. Cohen, and shortly after, the couple announced the
miraculous, late-in-life birth of their son, Julian Arthur Cohen. A perfect,
seamless fiction.
Back in the Villa, 1980
Steven, half-mad with guilt and grief, finally tracked her down. He
found her in a sunroom, staring blankly at a wall. The vibrant woman he loved
was gone, replaced by a hollow-eyed ghost.
"Elora," he breathed, falling to his knees before her wheelchair.
A flicker, a tremor in her blank gaze. A single tear traced a path down
her pale cheek. She could not speak. The doctors called it a profound catatonic
depression. Steven knew it was a soul in exile.
He vowed vengeance that day. He would destroy Arthur. He would get their
son back. He would use every dirty trick, align with every monster like Robert
Hayes, amass power and leverage in the shadows until he could tear his
brother's world apart. His love for Elora, thwarted and twisted, became the
fuel for his corruption. Every illegal deal, every buried secret through Kore
Tech, was a brick in a path he hoped would lead him back to her.
Present Day – The Car, En Route to the Clinic
Elara opened her eyes, the vivid pain of the flashback receding but
leaving a permanent stain. She looked at Silas, her own eyes bright with unshed
tears for the woman she now understood.
"She's not just a patient, Silas. She's a crime scene. The first and
most lasting one. Arthur didn't just cover up a scandal. He erased a woman and
rewrote her son's life. Steven's war wasn't just about power. It was about her.
All of it… everything with Robert, the ledger, the hatred… it all started with
a stolen child and a broken love."
Silas took her hand, his grip firm. "And now Julian is looking for the
same truth, from the other side. He's a man walking toward a loaded gun, and he
doesn't know he's holding the trigger."
The car pulled up to the sanitarium's gates. The façade of peaceful
healing seemed grotesque now. They were not here to evaluate a facility. They
were here to open a tomb and ask its occupant to speak. The tragic love story
of Steven and Elora was the root. And today, they would meet the living remnant
of that root, buried deep but never dead. The past was waiting for them,
patient as the mountains.