2026-02-26 12:00:31“Have you seen Amanda?” he asked, breathless. “She went to the restroom ten minutes ago. It’s our turn to present!!”
The girls exchanged looks. One of them, a blonde named Sarah who had always treated Nathan like a stray dog, let out a sharp laugh. “She’s exactly where she belongs, Nathan. Unlike you.”
“What does that even mean? Look, I just want to…”
“It means you should stop acting like you’re in her league,” Sarah cut in, stepping forward. “Did you really think she’d stay with a guy who spends his weekends scrubbing grease off laboratory floors? She’s a fucking Clinton, you knuckle-headed faggot. Her parents expect her to marry a king, not a... whatever the heck you are.”
“We’re partners,” Nathan snapped. “We built this together.”
“She’s a partner, alright,” another girl chimed in. “But she finally realized who has the real power in this school. You and your stupid project is worth less than $200, Nathan. Why would she waste the best night of her life on a project that’s going to get buried by the people who actually own this city?”
“Just fuck off and hide your broke-ass, ugly face in the trash!” yet another added. “You will never amount to anything in life!”
Nathan felt a cold shiver run down his spine. Something was wrong. Very wrong. He ignored the girls' laughter and turned back toward the Grand Hall. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Where the heck was Amanda? Where did she go??
As he reached the heavy oak doors of the hall, before he pushed it open, he saw something on the floor.
A small, silver flash drive.
He picked it up. His stomach did a slow, sickening flip. It was the backup drive. The one he had given Amanda "just in case."
He pushed the doors open.
The hall was dark, except for the massive spotlights focused on the center of the stage. The audience was silent, leaning forward in their seats.
Nathan’s eyes went to the stage, and as soon as his brain registered what he saw, his world ended. He died!!
There was Mark Epstein, standing tall, his chest puffed out with a pride he hadn't earned. He was wearing a headset mic, gesturing toward a large, glass cube that had been unveiled on the pedestal.
Nathan’s cube. Nathan’s project.
And standing right beside Mark, her hand resting on his arm, was Amanda. She wasn't crying. She wasn't forced or anything. She was glowing. She held the primary flash drive, the one Nathan thought he had in his hand just minutes ago, ..and was plugging it into the central monitor.
“...and that is why we call it the Epstein-Clinton Singularity,” Mark’s voice echoed through the hall, thick with fake humility. “My partner, Amanda Clinton, and I have spent the last three years in private development, funded by my father’s visionary investments, to bring you the world’s first, completed and fully functioning Quantum Machine!!!”
The ring box slipped from Nathan's fingers. It hit the carpeted floor with a dull, pathetic thud, the silver ring rolling away into the shadows of the back row.
On the giant screen behind them, the equations began to scroll. Nathan’s equations. The ones he had bled for. The ones he had stayed awake for the past seventy-two hours straight to finish while Amanda brought him coffee and told him she loved him.
“As you can see,” Amanda’s voice was steady and clear as she took the mic, “the processing power exceeds anything currently on the market by a factor of ten thousand. This isn't just a project. It’s the future of the human race and my boyfriend, Mark, and I are at the forefront!!”
The crowd went nuts. People were standing up. In the front row, the Proprietor, Mark’s father - was beaming, clapping his hands with the ferocity of a man who knew he had just secured a dynasty.
Nathan took a step forward into the light of the aisle. His vision was blurring at the edges. This was not happening… no…it couldn’t be true. His girlfriend had teamed up with his bully and stolen his life’s work… his project.. His Quantum Machine.
They had stripped his skin off in front of nine hundred plus people
He couldn’t believe what his eyes were seeing, neither could he believe what his ears were hearing. But as if that were not horrifying enough, he kept on watching as the two joined lips together on stage, Mark grabbed Amanda’s waist, and in front of the world, they…
Kissed!
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Chapter 216: The Chamber
Nobody moved.Nineteen people sat around that table, and not one of them made a sound. They had all just watched the same thing, and they were all thinking the same thought. The ground under this family had a trapdoor in it. And somebody had just pulled the lever.Nathan walked back to the foot of the table. He stayed on his feet."Ronav Walters. Abigail Walters-Croft." No anger in his voice now. That was the scary part. The anger had been used up somewhere else, days ago, in private. What was left was just business.Nathan continued, "Sixty-two million dollars. Eleven years. Two hundred and seven counts. You stole from every single person sitting here. From the aunts whose trusts you skimmed. From the cousins whose inheritance you priced into your own pockets. Fro
Chapter 215: Receipts
The first document was a wire transfer.It was small, as these things went. Four hundred thousand dollars, eleven years old, moving from a Walters real estate subsidiary into a consulting firm in Zurich that had no employees, no office, and no function except to exist. Dwayne laid a copy in front of every chair like a dealer at a card table, unhurried, letting the paper do its own talking."The Meridian Shore purchase everyone is so concerned about," Nathan said, "was real. It was also bait. Not for me. I wasn't in the country. It was structured, eleven years ago, as a place to hide this." He tapped the page. "One payment. The first one. There are two hundred and six others."The second document was a chart, and the chart was where the room stopped breathing.It was simple by design. Nathan had spent four of his eighty-six hours making it simple, because a boardroom does not convict on complexity, it convicts on shape, and the shape was unmistakable. Eleven years of money leaving the
Chapter 214: Raw!
"Why should this family trust a review conducted by a boy with eight days of experience?" The whole table held still. It was the question underneath every other question, the one they'd all carried in with their coffee. "You shouldn't," Nathan said. Cordelia's eyebrows rose a quarter inch. "Trust isn't what I'm asking for," he said. "Every figure I've cited this morning has a document number attached. The documents are in this room. Check me. Check all of it. I'd encourage it, honestly, because a Walters who asks to be trusted instead of checked is usually about to cost this family money." He looked at her, level, respectful, unafraid. "I didn't come here to be believed, Aunt. I came here to be verified. There's a difference, and the difference is the whole job." Cordelia stared at him. Eighty-one years of stares had gone into the making of this one, and lesser men than Nathan had confessed to crimes under weaker versions of it. Then she picked her pen back up, and
Chapter 213: The Long Table
The grand boardroom of the Walters estate had not been used, truly used, in six years.It sat at the very heart of the main house like a chamber of state. One table, forty feet of black walnut cut from a single tree, polished until the ceiling lights lay on its surface like coins at the bottom of a well. Nineteen chairs. No windows. Sage had built it that way on purpose. In this room, there was no weather, no time of day, no world outside. There was only the family, and the truth, and whichever of the two proved stronger.By nine o'clock, every chair was full.They had begun arriving at half past eight, and the seating itself was a war conducted in silence. Aunt Cordelia, eighty-one and the oldest living Walters, took the chair at Sage's right hand as birthright and dared anyone with her eyes. Uncle Amos, who ran shipping out of Singapore and had flown sixteen hours for this, positioned himself dead center where he could watch both ends of the table at once, which was Amos all over. P
Chapter 212: Knots
Friday arrived like every other day. Quietly, and exactly on schedule.In the east wing, Ronav Walters rose before the sun out of forty years of monastic habit and sat for a long time on the edge of his bed, prayer beads moving through his fingers, click by click, like a man counting down instead of counting blessings. He dressed in gray. He had read somewhere, decades ago, that gray was the color judges trusted. He had never needed the information until today.Two floors down, Abigail Walters-Croft stood at her mirror and applied her makeup with the slow, surgical care of a woman preparing for a photograph that would outlive her. She had slept four hours and looked like she'd slept nine. That was a skill. It had cost her thirty years and two marriages to learn it, and she intended to spend it all this morning.In a modest room in the south wing, modest by choice, Theodore Walters knotted a charcoal tie he had owned for eleven years and drank his tea standing up, reading through a slim
Chapter 211: The Beekeeper Writes Back
Nathan's breath left him in a short, sharp sound, somewhere between a gasp and a growl, before he could stop it.Across the room, Dwayne was upright in under a second, one hand already halfway to the sidearm holstered at his hip, his eyes wide and instantly, fully awake."Report," Dwayne said, voice rough but urgent, already scanning the room for the threat.Nathan's jaw worked. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, half-formed instructions already lining up — ‘trace this, break the encryption, get me an address, get me a team… do this, do that — and beneath all of it, a colder, older feeling he hadn't let himself feel since the streets. He wanted to say all of it. He wanted Dwayne to fix this the way Dwayne fixed everything, with a phone call and a very quiet, very final kind of certainty.But he didn't say any of it.Because that was exactly the problem, wasn't it. He was the heir. Not the ward. Dwayne was his right hand, not his crutch, and there was a difference between leaning o
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