Elara had always known the orphanage was rotten. You could smell it, in the sour stench of boiled cabbage served for dinner, in the mildew that clung to the dormitory sheets, in the way the caretakers' eyes darted at shadows when questions got too close to the truth. But suspicion and certainty were two different beasts. And on that night, inside the grand stone corridors of the Varezzi estate, she finally stumbled upon proof.
Like so many other nights, Damien had left for yet another business dinner, his voice curt, his eyes unreadable. His absence granted her hours alone in the mansion, and Elara used every second of it. Revenge didn't wait for romance; vengeance was her only lover.
She moved like a shadow through the estate's library, her fingers trailing over shelves filled with leather-bound volumes. The Varezzis liked to display the trappings of intellect, Shakespeare, Dante, Machiavelli, but beneath the classics, Elara suspected, lay the truth. For weeks she had been piecing together clues: loose papers in Damien's study, an odd reference in the family's financial ledgers, whispers from half-forgotten memories of the orphanage. Something was missing. Something connected her miserable childhood to the Varezzi empire.
That night, she found it.
A draft led her to the far corner of the library, where the paneling didn't quite meet the floor. It was subtle, imperceptible to anyone not actively looking for cracks in perfection. Elara pressed her palm against the oak panel. It shifted, just barely. Her pulse kicked. She pushed harder, and the wall groaned open, revealing a narrow chamber lined with filing cabinets.
Inside, the air smelled of paper and dust, the scent of secrets long buried. Her hands trembled as she tugged open a drawer labeled in neat handwriting: Siena Orphanage. Her orphanage. The place that had forged her scars.
She shouldn't have been surprised. She had always known she was a product of their cruelty. But seeing it written so plainly, her home reduced to a line item in their archives, stripped away the last illusions she clung to.
The first ledger looked harmless, a book of numbers. But as she flipped through, her stomach tightened. Each line item matched a "donation" made to the orphanage, hundreds of thousands flowing in from shell companies. The expenses, however, didn't match. Money was marked for "educational supplies" or "facility renovations," yet she remembered peeling paint, broken desks, and textbooks from decades past.
She kept turning pages. Then the euphemisms grew darker.
Relocation expenses.
Special medical transport.
Overseas placement.
She froze. She remembered those nights, those nights when children vanished from their bunks without a sound. The caretakers told them they'd been adopted. But no families ever came. No cheerful couples with hopeful smiles. Just silence, and the empty bed left behind.
Elara's throat tightened. Her eyes skimmed faster. By the next ledger, the veil of euphemism tore away completely.
Shipment: 12 units.
Destination: Port of Naples.
Handling: Confidential.
Her knees buckled. "Units." Not children. Not lives. Units.
The orphanage hadn't just been corrupt, it had been a warehouse. And she, like every child who slept beneath its cracked ceiling, had been inventory.
Elara forced herself to keep reading, though each page was another wound. Then she reached a section that made her blood run cold: a list of surnames. Not numbers. Not codes. Names.
Her surname.
Grant.
Her trembling finger hovered over it. She hadn't seen her real name written anywhere since childhood. It was followed by a note: Relocated. Status: erased.
Her lungs constricted. Erased? She was supposed to be dead. No wonder the world had forgotten her.She flipped the page, frantic. More names. More children. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Each one marked with fate's cold ink: erased, transferred, sold, disappeared. She recognized some. Faces from her childhood, thin arms, wide eyes, whispers at night when the caretakers weren't listening. Where do they take them? they'd ask. Elara never had an answer. Now she did.
Her mind reeled back to the whispers that had haunted her youth.
"Don't cry. If they hear you, they'll take you."
"They took Clara last week. She never came back."
"Don't ask questions. Questions get you vanished."
She had dismissed them as children's stories, nightmares invented to make sense of disappearances. But the ledgers were proof: the whispers had been true. Every ghost from her childhood now had a name, a price tag, a destination.
And woven through it all was the Varezzi family's signature. Their empire wasn't built on steel, oil, or clever investments. It was built on the bones of children. On the cries of the abandoned. On her.
At the bottom of the drawer, beneath the ledgers, she found a photograph. It was old, the edges frayed. She brushed off the dust, and her breath caught.
The picture showed a girl with dark hair, eyes burning with the same fire Elara saw in the mirror each morning. Herself.
She remembered the day, standing stiff in front of a gray wall while a caretaker snapped the photo. At the time, she had thought it was for school records. But the back of the photo told another story. In scrawled ink:
Lot #47- Grant, Elara.
Her childhood wasn't just stolen. It was catalogued, barcoded, and priced.
Tears blurred her vision, but fury cut through them. Every step she had taken toward revenge, every dangerous move she had made to infiltrate this family, it all felt insignificant compared to what she had just uncovered. She wasn't simply another victim of their empire. She was living proof of their crimes.
Her mission was no longer just about vengeance. It was about justice for herself, for the vanished children, for the ghosts still whispering in the walls of the orphanage.
She clutched the photo, her hands trembling, and whispered a vow to the silence:
"I will burn you all down."
She didn't hear Damien enter until his reflection flickered in the glass door of a cabinet.
"Elara," his voice cut through the air, sharp but unreadable.
Her body stiffened. The ledgers were still spread across the floor, damning evidence glowing in the lamplight. She snapped the drawer shut, but it was too late, he had seen.
His gaze lingered on the documents, then on her. His expression was a mask: controlled, cold, but behind it, something cracked, confusion, maybe even fear.