Chapter 16 - The Firstborn's Vengeance
Mateo stared at the worn leather notebook on the bench, unable to tear his eyes away. His mind raced, desperately trying to piece together the shattered puzzle of his family's history. Arthur Vance—the untouchable billionaire tyrant—had a son before Elena? A son he had hidden away just like he later hid Elena in the subterranean cell?
"You're lying," Mateo whispered, though the conviction in his voice was rapidly crumbling. "My father didn't have another family. Everything he owned was cataloged, seized, and audited down to the last penny."
"Audited by governments that only looked where Rosa and the feds told them to look," Julian replied, stepping closer, his emerald eyes—the exact same shade as Elena's—flashing with cold fury. "Arthur was a genius at compartmentalization. He kept one family in the sunlight to feed his public ego, and another in the dark to handle the dirty work he couldn't touch."
Julian tapped the cover of the leather notebook.
"Open it, Mateo. See what your precious father did to secure the initial funding for Vance Industries. See whose life, whose patents, and whose family he had to annihilate to buy that million-dollar mansion in the first place."
May you like
With trembling fingers, Mateo stepped forward and flipped open the cover. The first page was dated nearly forty years prior, written in a sharp, frantic hand that wasn't his mother's, nor his father's. It was signed by a man named Richard Vance—their grandfather, who had mysteriously "vanished" under suspicious circumstances when Arthur was just a young man.
October 12: Arthur wants full control of the partnership. He's poisoned my tea. If I don't survive the night, my true heir, Julian, must take the evidence to the international courts before Arthur steals the entire conglomerate.
