The instant I spotted my rare, multimillion-dollar platinum watch on the wrist of a little girl shivering in the alley, I froze. I demanded, “Where did you get that?”
She lifted her tiny hand, pointed into the darkness… and whispered a name that made my entire world collapse. My name is Arthur Penhaligon, and in the real estate world, they call me “The King of Concrete.”
Skyscrapers, luxury towers, and half the prime land in London belonged to me.
Inside the ballroom above, the city’s elite—politicians, tycoons, old-money families—were celebrating my 50th birthday. They sipped rare champagne and told jokes they didn’t find funny, pretending to admire me. I hated all of it.
More painfully—I hated the version of myself I had become. Five years earlier, my wife Elena and our infant son disappeared during a sailing trip near Sicily. No bodies were ever found.
The world called it a tragedy. For me, it was a wound that never healed. I threw myself into real estate deals, building towers as if height could replace the life I’d lost.
“Sir?” my chief advisor Julian touched my arm gently.“The Minister would like a word.”
“Tell him I’m taking a break,” I muttered. I didn’t smoke—I just needed air that didn’t reek of money and lies. I took the private elevator down to the service level—no cameras, no reporters, no pretending.
Outside, snow drifted onto the pavement, melting into gray slush. I leaned against a wall, closing my eyes. That’s when I heard it.
A faint melody floating through the cold. A child’s humming. I opened my eyes.
A little girl—maybe six—was crouched behind a row of recycling bins. Her coat was oversized and dirty, her cheeks red from the cold. She wasn’t begging.
She was singing softly:
“Sleep, my little soldier, the war is far away…”
My blood froze. That wasn’t a popular song. It was a lullaby Elena had written.
She only sang it to our son. No one else knew it. “Who are you?” I rasped, stepping forward.
The girl flinched, dropping a half-eaten sandwich. She looked ready to bolt, her eyes wide and terrified. They were green.
Elena’s green. “I didn’t steal it!” she squeaked, her British accent thick with the rough cadence of the East End streets. “The man threw it away!”
I ignored the sandwich.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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