Silly Campus Boy Is The Biggest Heir

Chapter 3: Leo Marsh Doesn't Exist Anymore

Martha couldn't sleep either, though for reasons she wouldn't have admitted to Alicent in a hundred years. She lay in her dorm room replaying the scene at the restaurant—not the part where the table had erupted into cruel laughter, but the split second right before. She kept seeing the precise flicker of raw, wounded shock that had crossed Leo's face before his expression had gone completely, frighteningly still.

She had seen him tired. She had seen him stressed. But she had never seen him go quiet like that—a silence so cold it felt like a door slamming shut and locking from the inside.

Guilt sat in her chest like a jagged stone she couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out. She tried to tell herself it had been necessary. Alicent had been circling her for weeks, dropping pointed hints that she knew about the secret phone calls, that Martha's late nights weren't as hidden as she thought.

Panic had seized Martha, and in a desperate bid to protect her place on the squad, she had done the only thing she could think of to make the target disappear. She had grabbed the knife first, making sure she was the one stabbing instead of the one bleeding.

It didn't make her feel any better. If anything, it made her skin crawl, because a small, brutally honest part of her recognized the truth: she had torn him apart in the cruelest possible way, in front of the exact audience guaranteed to make the damage permanent.

Now, wrapped in the cold silence of her room, the phantom weight of his hand holding hers on quiet nights felt like an amputation she had performed on herself, leaving a phantom ache that no amount of social standing could ever cure.

She showed up at The Brass Griddle the next afternoon under the pretense of grabbing coffee, telling herself she just wanted to offer a quiet apology—unwilling to admit, even to herself, that she desperately needed to see his face and confirm he was still the soft, dependable boy she had fallen for.

The shift manager, wiping down the greasy counter without looking up, didn't even pause. "Leo? Called in at dawn. Quit on the spot, no notice given. Didn't even come pick up his last check."

Martha stood frozen in the middle of the empty dining room, a sudden, cold tremor running down her spine.

That evening, a plain Manila envelope arrived at her dorm door with no return address. Inside was an official confirmation letter for an anonymous academic grant, covering the exact tuition gap her financial aid had left unpaid. At the bottom of the page, written in clean, precise black ink, was a single line:

You never needed permission to be enough.

There was no signature. Her initial instinct, desperate and confused, was to think of Chase—the wealthy jock she’d assumed for months was her quiet benefactor. But her second thought—the one she tried to push away as fast as it surfaced—was that Chase had never once, in an entire year of flirtation, said anything that gentle, or known her well enough to say anything that specific.

High above the heavy overcast clouds, Leo Marsh was already gone, folded up and discarded like a cheap coat he’d finally outgrown.

Leanor Prime sat in the leather-lined cabin of a private jet, clad in a hand-tailored charcoal suit that cost more than the restaurant made in a month. He watched the sprawling, neon-lit skyline of the city rise beneath him through the window, allowing himself exactly one silent moment of grief for his late father before his encrypted phone rang.

He answered, and his brother's voice filled the cabin. But Luke’s tone had changed. It wasn't the arrogant sneer from their text exchange; it was colder, sharper, and far more composed than Leanor had expected from a man allegedly on the brink of losing everything.

"I know you're coming, little brother," Luke said smoothly. "I have something waiting for you the second you land. Consider it a homecoming gift."

Leanor didn't take the bait. His voice remained flat, entirely stripped of the warmth he’d spent two years feigning. "Save the dramatics for the board, Luke. I have a gift for you, too."

He ended the call before his brother could reply and leaned his head back against the seat. In the quiet hum of the jet's engine, it wasn't Luke's unsettling confidence that lingered in his mind, but Martha’s face in that restaurant booth. You were never enough for me.

The words echoed in the silence, strange and persistent, finding fresh ways to sting every time his mind replayed them. Beneath the hard armor of his new reality, a dull, throbbing fracture remained, a bitter reminder of what happens when you give your real heart to someone who only wanted a stepping stone. He forced the memory down, locking it away behind a wall of cold resolve. Softness had cost him two years. He wouldn't pay another cent.

As the jet began its final descent toward the private terminal, his lead council pushed a final document through to his tablet, a file hidden so deep within their father's personal archives that it had taken two years of forensic auditing to unearth.

It was a certified copy of their father's original, unredacted will, containing a specific conditional clause that the version Luke had presented to the board had conveniently omitted.

Leanor read the clause once. He read it a second time, his eyes narrowing as he absorbed the full, ruthless scope of what his father had actually set in motion.

A quiet, dangerous laugh escaped his chest. He looked out the window at the runway lights rushing up to meet the landing gear and murmured to the empty cabin, "So that's why you were so terrified of me reading this."

The tires struck the tarmac with a heavy, definitive screech. Leanor Prime unbuckled his belt and stood up, a completely different man than the one who had boarded hours ago. And neither his brother, nor Chase, nor the girl who had called him not enough had the slightest idea how violently their world was about to break.