Silly Campus Boy Is The Biggest Heir

Chapter 6: What Okafor Knew

The parking structure Okafor chose was three blocks from headquarters, nearly empty at this hour, lit by a handful of flickering fluorescent tubes that made everything look slightly underwater. Leanor arrived early and waited, watching the entrance with the specific, coiled tension of a man who no longer trusted stillness, his breath fogging faintly in the cold concrete air.

Okafor arrived on foot, collar turned up, glancing at the security cameras mounted in the corners with a wariness that told Leanor everything before he spoke a single word.

"Not here," Okafor murmured, pulling him further into the heavy shadow of a concrete pillar where the nearest camera's angle went blind. "Cameras don't lie about who was where, and I don't intend to be somewhere tonight."

He told it carefully, in jagged pieces, like a man defusing an unexploded ordnance he'd been carrying too long, his hands trembling faintly around nothing. In the weeks before Leanor's father died, the lending division—the very subsidiary Leanor now quietly controlled a stake in—had been running unauthorized loans under executive signatures that were never properly verified.

Small amounts at first, then larger ones, then sums so massive that a routine audit would have caught the bleeding in a single afternoon. Their father had discovered the pattern himself, buried deep inside a routine report nobody expected him to actually read, and scheduled an emergency audit for the following week.

He died four days before that audit was set to happen, collapsed at his desk on a Tuesday evening, entirely alone. The official report called it a heart attack.

Leanor's voice, when he finally spoke, came out flatter than he intended, each word carved from ice. "Who had access to forge those signatures?"

Okafor hesitated long enough that pure, naked fear finally outweighed decades of corporate loyalty, his eyes wet and shining in the dim light. "Two people did." A ragged, reluctant breath tore from his throat. "Your brother. And Chase Callum's father."

The connection landed like a physical blow to the chest, and Leanor had to slam a hand against the freezing concrete pillar to steady himself. Chase's loans hadn't been random teenage desperation dressed up in a wealthy family's name.

They had been following a calculated playbook his own father had learned from someone deep inside Prime Golden—someone with enough executive power to teach a bankrupt man how to keep a massive lie alive on borrowed signatures for over a year without a single red flag.

Across town, in a dorm room lit only by the harsh blue glow of her phone screen, Martha was chasing a smaller, more confusing thread of the same tangle without any idea how massive the web really was. She had finally cornered Chase that evening outside the campus gym, asking him directly about a rare, out-of-print book he had supposedly sent her months ago—a specific first edition she had only mentioned once, in passing, during a late-night study session neither of them had ever discussed since.

Chase completely blanked, his eyes sliding sideways the way they always did when he was scrambling to build a lie in real-time. He recovered badly, claiming unconvincingly that he'd "had someone handle it, some assistant, I don't even remember which one."

Martha's stomach plummeted, not with the sharp ache of romantic betrayal, but with the colder, more disorienting sensation of wrongness—the sickening realization that a story she had trusted had never quite fit, starting to unravel in her hands like wet paper.

She sat cross-legged on her bed until nearly two in the morning, cross-referencing old text timestamps, gifts, and the specific wording of things she had only ever spoken aloud once.

None of it matched a boy who had forgotten her birthday twice and had called her by her middle name for an entire week without noticing his own mistake. A hollow, aching emptiness bloomed behind her ribs as she finally faced the terrifying possibility that the person she thought she knew was a ghost, and the boy she had callously pushed away in that restaurant was the only one who had ever truly seen her.

Back in the parking structure, Leanor thanked Okafor and turned to leave, his mind running through the horrifying, intricate architecture of what he had just learned. His father hadn't just died of natural causes. He had been about to blow the lid off an empire-ending fraud, and four days had been all the time someone needed to ensure he never finished what he started.

His phone buzzed violently against his palm the second he reached his car. An anonymous text, completely untraceable, containing a single photograph: himself and Okafor standing in the exact shadows where they had just spoken. It was timestamped one hour ago, taken from an angle that proved someone had tracked one of them without either noticing.

Underneath the image was a single line, cold and precise enough to raise every hair on his arms:

Careful who you trust with the truth. I've been watching longer than you think.

Leanor stood very still in the empty, echoing structure, his phone glowing in his hand, the engine of his car still ticking as it cooled. He understood with absolute, chilling clarity that whoever had murdered his father—if that monstrous truth was real—was still close enough to watch him breathe, waiting for him to make a single fatal misstep.

He didn't drive straight home. He sat in the dark car for nearly twenty minutes with the ignition off, mentally stripping away every variable, running through every person who could have possibly known he would be in that structure at that exact hour. The list narrowed uncomfortably fast to individuals working deep inside Prime Golden itself.

Okafor hadn't told anyone; Leanor knew that with the instinctual trust of a man who recognized genuine terror. Which meant whoever sent that photo already had eyes inside the building close enough to track Okafor's movements before Leanor had even arrived.

He finally drove home along the winding river road instead of the highway, taking the long way for no rational reason except that his nerves were frayed too raw to sit still. He replayed his father's face at the last birthday dinner they had shared, desperately searching his memory for some hidden warning he might have blindly missed.

There had been none. That was the most agonizing part of all. His father had sat across from him that night like a man who believed he had decades left to fix whatever rot he had uncovered in that audit report.

And someone had stolen all those tomorrows in the span of a single Tuesday evening.