Chapter 16 - THE UNKNOWN PLAYERI stepped out onto the front porch, ignoring the freezing rain as Marco swept the perimeter with his tactical flashlight. The beam cut through the dark, swirling mist, illuminating the wet stone pillars of the gate, but whoever had left the envelope was already gone, swallowed entirely by the stormy night.
I walked up to the pillar, picked up the silver envelope, and pulled the black ribbon free.
Inside was a single photograph and a typed note.
The photograph showed my father standing alongside a sharp-featured, elegant man I had never seen before—a man wearing an expensive tailored suit, shaking hands in front of the very same Greystone Manor fireplace years ago.
The note read:
“You found the first layer, Damian. But you still don't know who funded your father’s hostile takeover back in '94. The true owner is coming home. And he wants his house back.”
No signature. Just a small, embossed corporate logo at the bottom corner of the page: Sterling & Sterling Global Holdings.
Vivienne’s family.
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For months, I had believed Vivienne and Julian acted alone out of desperate greed. But looking at the photograph, the brutal reality set in: Vivienne wasn't the mastermind. She was a pawn deployed by a much larger, much more dangerous player who had been pulling the strings from the shadows all along—her uncle, Arthur Sterling Sr., a man thought to have died in a private plane crash twenty years ago.
If Arthur Sterling was still alive, then every single asset I controlled, every stock share I owned, and every brick of Greystone Manor was subject to a multi-billion-dollar predatory hostile takeover designed to completely erase the Vance dynasty.
