Silly Campus Boy Is The Biggest Heir

Chapter 5: Seventeen Companies

Luke's proof, when he finally produced it that afternoon in a private meeting meant to intimidate rather than inform, was cheaper than Leanor expected. Grainy surveillance photos, out of context and badly framed, showed Leanor meeting with unnamed men in parking garages and hotel lobbies over the past two years, briefcases changing hands, faces half turned away from the camera.

Presented with the right spin to a nervous board, they could be made to look like backroom deals, gambling debts, worse.

"You've been running something in the shadows," Luke said, sliding the photos across the desk with the satisfaction of a man who thought he'd found a weakness, leaning back like the matter was already settled. "The board will want to know what."

Leanor looked at the photographs of himself, of meetings he remembered with total clarity, negotiations over a failing textile plant, a distressed logistics company he'd talked back from bankruptcy at two in the morning over cheap coffee, and felt something close to amusement rise up under the tension in his chest.

"You're right," he said, sliding the photos back across the desk one by one. "I have been running something."

He didn't raise his voice. He simply pulled out his phone, dialed his analyst, and asked her to patch into the boardroom's screen remotely for the reconvened session an hour later. When the board assembled, confused and half expecting a confession, murmuring among themselves, Leanor let the numbers speak instead of him.

Seventeen distressed companies, acquired and turned profitable over two years, entirely outside the Prime name, entirely legal, independently audited by a firm the chairwoman herself recognized and trusted on sight, her eyebrows lifting at the name on the letterhead. An eight-figure portfolio built out of a waiter's salary and a mind that had never once stopped working, even while his hands were carrying trays of water nobody thanked him for.

The chairwoman actually laughed, stunned into it, one hand pressed to her chest, looking at the numbers scrolling across the screen like she needed to read them twice to trust them. "You built a second Prime Golden out of a restaurant job."

"No," Leanor said, and something in his voice made the correction land harder than the number itself. "I built something better. Nobody handed it to me."

Luke's composure cracked visibly, a hairline fracture in the confidence he'd worn into the room, his knuckles whitening slightly around his pen, but he recovered too fast, faster than a man genuinely surprised should be able to. It needled at Leanor in a way the photographs hadn't. Someone this prepared for a fight he claimed not to have expected losing had been planning this for longer than two years.

Afterward, in the hallway, an older board member named Mr. Okafor pulled Leanor aside, glancing at the door before he spoke, his voice dropped low and careful in a way that made the hair on Leanor's arms rise. Okafor had served under Leanor's father for two decades, had taught him to tie a proper tie at fourteen, had cried openly at the funeral. He wasn't a man given to nerves.

"Your father didn't choose you just because he trusted your ambition, Leanor," Okafor said, his eyes darting once toward the far end of the corridor.

"There's something else in that estate you haven't been shown. I promised him I'd only tell you if you came back and proved yourself first." He looked at Leanor for a long moment, something like grief moving behind his eyes, an old man's grief that had been waiting patiently for two years to finally set itself down. "You just did."

Leanor felt the floor of the day shift under him, the boardroom victory suddenly small next to whatever Okafor was working up to say. "Tell me now."

"Not here." Okafor's eyes flicked to the security camera mounted above them.

Okafor's phone rang before he could say more. He glanced at the screen and his face drained of color so fast Leanor instinctively stepped closer, ready to catch him if his knees gave out. Okafor waved him off, composed himself with visible effort, straightening his tie the way he'd taught Leanor to years ago, and told Leanor to meet him somewhere private that night, alone, no lawyers, no assistants, no phones left switched on.

As he turned to leave, he said one more thing, quiet enough that Leanor had to lean in to catch it over the hum of the building's air conditioning.

"Your father didn't die of a heart attack, son." His voice cracked on the last word. "I've kept that quiet long enough."

Leanor stood in the corridor for a long moment after Okafor disappeared into the elevator, the fluorescent lights humming overhead, his own reflection ghosted faintly in the dark glass of the boardroom door.

He thought of the eulogy he'd given at nineteen, the careful, practiced words about a man who'd worked himself into an early grave, words he'd believed completely because grief had made the official story easy to swallow. He thought of Luke standing beside him at that funeral, dry-eyed and rigid, and wondered now, with a coldness he didn't recognize in himself, how much of that stillness had been grief at all.

His phone buzzed with a message from his lawyer confirming the seventy-two hour clock was already ticking, that the board expected his rebuttal to Luke's character allegations by the following evening.

Leanor read it twice, then pocketed the phone and walked the length of the hallway alone, past offices that still bore his father's old title on brass plates nobody had bothered to update, and understood that the deadline Luke had set to bury him had just become the exact window he needed to dig his father back up.