Chapter 31: The Doppelganger

Chapter 31: Chapter 31: The Doppelganger

A list of achievements appeared beneath his name. Owner of several software companies and Technologies, Artificial Intelligence laboratories, Cybersecurity firms, Real Estate developments, and international investment groups spread across multiple countries.

The list seemed endless and Zoey’s mouth slowly fell open. "Holy...shit!" she breathed, the words barely audible. She traced a finger over the crisp corporate headshot, a man with eyes that seemed to bore into the very essence of the viewer.

She leaned back in disbelief, her chair groaning softly in protest. Her eyes, usually quick and darting, widened incrementally with each new piece of information that scrolled by.

"Iris, my dear, you were not exaggerating in the slightest. ’Loaded’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. He is Alexander Grant. The Alexander Grant. Grant Enterprises?

His software company is literally my internship dream, practically. The audacity of him, just being... him." A low whistle escaped her lips. The irony was almost comical. The man who had, spent the night with her best friend, was also the titan of industry she’d been eyeing for months.

She clicked again and within seconds, page after page appeared. News articles about him, even magazine covers, Philanthropy, the mysterious billionaire who rarely gave personal interviews and only business interviews, his forbes rankings, his Fortune, business weekly. company acquisitions and International investments.

Zoey’s eyebrows climbed steadily higher and she whistled. "No wonder Iris said that his penthouse looked like something from a movie."

She sat back thoughtfully. "Iris...." She folded her arms, still in shock. "...you literally met and fucked one of the richest men in the world....and somehow you ran away from him?"

She couldn’t help smiling. "You had sex with Alexander fucking Grant. I can’t believe this. You have absolutely no idea who he really is. Golden boy doesn’t even hold a candle to this guy."

A fleeting thought, quick as a hummingbird’s wing, flitted through her mind: Should I tell Iris? She reached for her phone with the intention to call Iris and fill her in on what she just found out. Her thumb hovered above Iris’s contact. Then...she slowly lowered it again.

"No." She shook her head. "If Iris wanted to know who he was.....she would’ve simply asked him."

Also, Iris had been very clear about her intentions – or lack thereof – regarding relationships. She wasn’t ready for any relationships at the moment.

Besides...something still bothered her. This mystery about the wolf mark and these visions that iris keeps experiencing. All these started happening, just when she met the guy and slept with him.

Zoey knows for a fact that, none of those mysterious things could be explained by Alexander simply being rich. Money didn’t make supernatural tattoos appear overnight.

"There has to be something else."

Yes the man was a public figure, yet there was an opaque quality to his online presence, a carefully curated image that felt... incomplete. As if there were layers beneath the surface, meticulously hidden. Magical wolf tattoos weren’t typically part of a standard billionaire bio.

Besides...the expression on Alexander’s face inside the nightclub returned vividly to her memory.

Zoey went back to the CCTV image of the night that Iris met the guy, and re-watched the video of that night. Zoey found out that there was just something that bothered her....the way Alexander had looked at Iris.

The man noticed them.... especially Iris, immediately they entered the club. And he hadn’t looked at Iris the way men usually looked at beautiful women.

It had been...different and too intense. Almost as though finding Iris had meant something far greater than attraction.

Zoey frowned at what she was watching. "There has to be more to you than expensive suits and magazine covers. My instincts have always been right, and right now....they’re screaming that there’s something off about you."

Her expression slowly became serious and she opened another encrypted browser.

"If your public profile doesn’t have the answers....then I’ll have to look somewhere the public can’t."

She opened another browser. "Right," she declared, her voice firmer now, a spark of resolve in her eyes. "Time to go off-road."

This time...she stopped using ordinary search engines. Her fingers flew and moved faster across the keyboard, a symphony of rapid clicks and key presses. The screen transformed, displaying a dizzying array of terminal windows, green text scrolling endlessly.

Encrypted networks connected and several authentication prompts flashed by before disappearing. Lines of code rolled rapidly across one monitor.

Zoey wasn’t just proficient; she was a virtuoso in the digital underworld. She navigated encrypted networks, bypassed firewalls, and delved into archived databases with practiced ease. The air in the room seemed to crackle with her focused energy.

Directories appeared, then private archives and old newspaper scans, even historical databases. The deeper she dug...the stranger things became.

"Huh..."

One file refused to open, and another demanded authorized credentials to access it. The third one just appeared blank.

Zoey smiled. "This just keeps getting Interesting. Even the president’s files are not this protected like this." The smile widened. "My instincts were right after all, there’s more to this guy. And clearly, somebody really doesn’t want people poking around much about him."

But Zoey didn’t care anyway, and she just continued doing what she was doing. She just needs to find something that will prove her right afterall.

After another minute of dancing around the web...a forgotten archive finally opened. But Instead of financial records...a new page slowly began to load, pixel by agonizing pixel. When it finally rendered, Zoey’s breath hitched. An old photograph slowly faded onto the screen.

The image was badly aged....Sepia colored, and it looked like it was taken well over a century ago.

Immediately she saw it, Zoey’s smile vanished. "...No way."

She leaned until her face was only inches from the monitor. She just needed to be sure of what she was seeing with her eyes. Maybe it was trying to play tricks on her.

Because standing in the center of the photograph...Was unmistakably Alexander. Or...someone identical to him.

The clothing was anachronistic, formal and stiff, reminiscent of a bygone era, perhaps the 19th century, or even earlier.

The man wore an impeccably tailored nineteenth-century black suit, complete with a high-collared waistcoat and pocket watch chain.

His posture was unmistakable, it was the same piercing blue eyes, the same sharp jawline. And the same expression that carried quiet authority. Only his hairstyle reflected another era. The resemblance was uncanny, a mirror image, yet the context was all wrong.

"What...is this?" Her whisper barely escaped. "This has to be...Who is that?" she whispered, her brow furrowing. "A distant ancestor? The family resemblance is quite something."

She kept looking at the image, and sighed....frustrated. "There is just no way that you’ll look very much identical to someone from the nineteenth-century, even if that person was your great...great....grand father. And there’s no way in hell that it could be the very same person. Because this picture is very old."

She squinted her eyes at the photograph, "I wonder when this picture was taken."

She searched beneath the photograph, and found no name attached to the photo, and no description whatsoever about it. The only thing she found was a faded date, written just beneath the photo.

1891.

Her heartbeat skipped. "That’s impossible. No way that’s the same person."

Then she noticed something else....a house, or rather a mansion. Another click, another layer peeled back. This time, a sprawling estate appeared, ancient and imposing, shrouded in ivy. "Blackthorne Estate," a brief caption read.

"Blackthorne? But his surname was Grant. Why does it say Blackthorne?" Zoey was now confused by all these things she keeps finding.

The pieces didn’t quite fit, a puzzle with too many missing edges. She dug deeper, relentless in her pursuit. A third image materialized, older still, grainier.

This time, Alexander wasn’t alone. The same man, Alexander’s doppelganger, stood alongside two other men, equally antiquated in their attire, their faces obscured by the passage of time and the poor resolution. But despite the poor resolution, one would know that the other two men equally striking men.

One had long black hair tied neatly behind his head. The other possessed the same dark hair and eyes so pale they almost appeared silver even in the faded photograph.

"And who are they?" Zoey murmured, a thrill of impending discovery coursing through her.

All three men stood before the same enormous stone mansion. Its towering architecture resembled something from an old European estate.

Below the image appeared the same single caption that was found previously in Alexander’s doppelganger’s photo.....Blackthorne Estate.

"Just what is this estate?" Zoey mused again and wanting to know more, immediately searched the name.

And to her surprise...results about the enormous mansion still existed. They were very few but it was enough.

Most described it simply as an old private estate whose ownership records had changed repeatedly over the last century.