The CEO’s Secret Twin Took His Life and His Wife

The morning my husband came home smelling like another man, I told myself it was nothing.

I stood at the kitchen island of our penthouse, sipping on a long cooled cup of coffee as Damian scrolled silently through his phone. His dark hair was the same, combed back from his forehead in the style he wore throughout college. His charcoal suit was the same, tailored to fit his broad shoulders that I knew so intimately from five years of marriage. The wedding band on his left hand was the same, simple platinum band etched with the coordinates to the restaurant where he proposed.

Everything was the same.

And that was the problem.

"You're staring," Damian said, not looking up from his phone.

"Am I?"

His thumb paused in the middle of swiping, and something unreadable passed over his face before he looked up at me. "You've been doing that a lot lately."

Have I? Or have you just started noticing?

I forced a smile. "Just thinking about the Morrison acquisition."

The lie hung between us like a physical entity.

Damian nodded, already standing, already reaching for his briefcase. "Late meeting tonight. Don't wait up."

He kissed my forehead - not my lips, not anymore - and disappeared out the door before I could decide if the knot of unease in my stomach was intuition or paranoia.

Three months ago, I would've called my best friend Sasha to complain about how marriage had turned me into a jealous, neurotic woman.

Three months ago, I wouldn't have been counting.

Counting the days since Damian had touched me like a man, instead of a husband. (47)

Counting the nights he'd come home after midnight. (23 out of the last 30)

Counting the little things, the strange changes that had turned my husband into someone I barely recognized.

But three months ago, I hadn't found the photograph.

I didn't go to the gallery that morning.

I waited until the elevator doors slid open on the floor where Damian's office was located, then I followed him inside. The door to his study was unlocked, as it always was. Damian never locked his doors, not in our home. This man, whoever he was, had kept the habit. Small mercies.

The study smelled of leather and sandalwood, with a hint of something clinical underneath.

I went to his desk first, rifling through the drawers with shaking hands. Nothing unusual, just contracts and reports, a Montblanc pen I'd gotten him as a wedding present. I traced the engraving on the end of it with a fingertip, D.V. from E.V. and a wave of something sharp and choking rolled through me.

Where are you, Damian?

What have you become?

Because something had happened to him. I knew it with the same certainty as I knew the scent of his cologne, the sound of his laughter. It had started thirteen months ago, right after his business trip to Zurich. He'd come home changed, that first time. Not in an easy way, not in a way that anyone but me would notice. His business partners still saw the brilliant CEO, the same man who'd built Vance Industries from nothing. His employees still saw the exacting but fair boss. Even Sasha had told me yesterday, rolling her eyes at my worries, that all marriages went through a cooling-off period after the honeymoon. That I was being ridiculous, imagining things, projecting my own fears about turning thirty onto an otherwise perfect husband.

Sasha didn't sleep next to him, curled around his broad back as I did every night.

Sasha hadn't found the photograph.

It had been five weeks ago, when I was looking for a tax document he'd asked me to find. I had his instructions on where to look, down to the exact drawer, and I found something else entirely behind the filing cabinet. A photograph, tucked in a crack in the drywall, yellowed with age.

Two boys stood in the middle of it, identical except for the slight difference in their coloring, their features softened by the passage of time. They wore the same school uniform, their faces lit with a mix of mischief and something deeper, something wistful. The one on the left - the one who looked just like Damian - smiled the same half-smile I had fallen in love with all those years ago.

The other boy was his twin.

I didn't know Damian had a twin.

The thought slipped into my head, light and cold, because I knew everything there was to know about my husband. I knew that he'd been sent to foster care when his parents died in a car accident when he was six years old. I knew that he'd built Vance Industries from the ground up, fought and clawed his way into the Fortune 500. He'd never talked about it, not really, but I knew. He'd never mentioned a brother, not once, in the five years of our marriage.

I stood in his study, clutching the photograph to my chest, and heard the front door open twenty minutes early.

"Elena?"

His voice was familiar, achingly familiar, as he stepped into the room. But the expression on his face - the look of shock, of something close to horror - was not the look of a man whose wife had found his long-dead twin brother.

It was the look of a man whose wife had found something much more personal.

That was the first time I'd let myself think, That is not my husband.

I never found the tax records, and I never told anyone about the photograph. And the man who looked like Damian - this Damian - never asked about either of them.

That night, he took the photograph from my shaking hands with a gentleness that almost hurt. "I'll tell you," he'd said, "just not yet."

He never did.

And I was still searching, five weeks later, when I found myself standing in his study yet again. I knew what I was looking for, this time. Not the photograph, which he'd hidden well enough, but something else. Something that would either prove that I was crazy, or that the man in my bed, running my company, living my life, was not who I thought he was.

The safe behind the Kandinsky painting.

I'd seen him open it once, months ago, and I'd memorized the combination in the dark. Not because I was some sort of crazy paranoid wife, but because I loved him. I knew everything about him, and the safe behind his favorite painting was another secret he kept from me. I stood in the doorway of his study, pretending to watch him as he poured himself a drink. My fingers traced the numbers in the air, 23-14-08, the coordinates to the restaurant where we'd gotten married. He'd used them for everything.

The safe clicked open with a soft chime.

Inside, I found what I was looking for. Passports. A handful of them, in various states of use. I pulled them out one by one, fanning them out across his desk. Damian's current passport, his old one, mine - why was my passport in here? A fourth passport, belonging to no one I knew, lay across from mine.

I opened it, my breath catching in my throat, and stared at the man in the photograph. He looked just like Damian, just like his twin brother from the photograph, but the name on the page was different. Not Damian Vance, or even Julian Cross, but something else entirely.

The man behind me cleared his throat.

"You found it faster than I expected."

I turned, my heart hammering against my ribs, and met the eyes of the man who looked just like my husband. "You never went to Zurich, did you?" My voice was quiet, almost laughing. "You've known for weeks, and you've been waiting to see how long I'd pretend."

He took a step closer. "The photograph, the way you flinch when I touch you, the late nights you spend here in my study searching through my things. You've known all along, Elena. I've always known."

My hand closed around the unfamiliar passport. "Where is my husband?"

The man - the monster - who looked like Damian smiled. A real smile, this time, something cold and cruel stretching across his face. "Somewhere you'll never find him."

He reached past me, fingers gentle, and closed the safe. "Now, now. Let's talk about what happens next."

The word next was hanging between us like a guillotine.

I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. My fingers curled around the passport - Julian Cross - and the name was digging into my palm, working its way into my veins. My whole body screamed to run, to demand something, anything, besides standing petrified in front of a man whose face was my husband's, but whose eyes held no trace of Damian.

"You're wondering if you should run," he said. "Don't."

"Why not?" My voice sounded steadier than I felt.

"Because there's nowhere to go," said Julian, pouring himself a brandy from the decanter on the sideboard. He stood by the bookshelf, his back to me, the glass in his hand not shaking at all. "You could call the police, tell them an interesting story about your husband's twin brother. They might even believe you." He turned around, took a slow sip. "By the time they find him, he'll be dead."

Dead. Not missing. Not gone. Killable.

"You're lying," I whispered.<