Silly Campus Boy Is The Biggest Heir

Chapter 7: The Book Martha Never Told Him About

Martha's investigation accelerated with the frantic, obsessive focus of someone who finally possessed a question worth answering. She retreated to her dorm room, pulling out eighteen months of accumulated gifts, favors, and quiet kindnesses she had always blindly assumed came from Chase.

She laid them out chronologically across a legal pad hidden inside the pages of an old chemistry textbook, forcing herself to look past the gratitude and the deep-seated shame of her own poverty that had kept her blind for so long.

A chilling pattern emerged. Every single gift matched something she had said only once, quietly, to someone who had actually been listening—down to the exact shade of blue, the precise clothing size, the hyper-obscure detail of a childhood memory.

Chase couldn't even remember what classes she was taking; he forgot her birthday twice and called her by her middle name for a week straight without noticing. Whoever had been funding her life had forgotten nothing at all. A heavy, suffocating wave of grief crashed over her chest, the bitter realization that she had thrown away the only person who truly cared for a polished illusion of status.

She walked to The Brass Griddle during her lunch break, telling herself she just wanted closure, though she knew damn well she was lying.

An older waitress, wiping down the greasy laminate counter, spoke of Leo with the casual detachment reserved for someone who had already slipped into local folklore. "Sweet kid, weird hours though. Used to duck out back some nights for phone calls that didn't sound like a waiter's calls—all business, numbers, cold and exact.

And that watch he wore sometimes when he thought nobody was looking, tucked under his sleeve? That wasn't a fast-food watch, honey. I used to wait tables at a country club. I know what real money looks like on a man's wrist."

Martha's chest tightened violently, a sharp, physical pain blooming behind her ribs. Her fingers curled around her ceramic coffee cup so hard her knuckles turned stark white, a sudden, blinding panic tearing through her. The boy she had humiliated in front of the whole school hadn't been a pathetic, desperate stalker. He had been a sanctuary, and she had smashed it to pieces with her own hands.

Across town, Chase Callum was unraveling in terrifying, unscripted real-time. The sudden, merciless recall of his family's loans had triggered the exact catastrophic chain reaction Leanor had engineered: relentless debt collectors calling at all hours of the day and night, his once-arrogant father drinking heavily through the afternoons in a moth-eaten bathrobe, and his younger sister crying quietly in her bedroom.

Alicent, sensing the rapid shift in campus social weather with the predatory survival instinct of a vulture, began distancing herself from Chase entirely. She canceled dates over cold text messages and laughed a little too loudly with new company at lunch, proving with every calculated betrayal that her loyalty had never been an emotion—it was just a currency spent only on winners.

Meanwhile, Leanor utilized every agonizing second of his narrowing seventy-two-hour window to hunt down the architect of the forged loan signatures. Hunched over his desk in the dark, eyes bloodshot and burning from strain, he cross-referenced the fraudulent documents against Marsh Capital's newly acquired controlling stake in the lending subsidiary.

It was grueling, meticulous forensic work, forged from the exact same disciplined stamina he had spent two years mastering out of nights exactly like this. Buried deep within a batch of high-risk commercial credits, he found a recurring signature pattern—a subtle, distinct slant on the capital L that he recognized instantly. It was a handwriting he had looked at a hundred times on birthday cards, report cards, and childhood permission slips.

He sat motionless in the dark room for a long, heavy minute before he let himself say the words aloud, the confession tasting like ash on his tongue.

"It was never Chase's father," he whispered to the empty room, the framed photograph of his father staring down at him from the lampstand like a silent witness. "Luke did this alone."

He grabbed his phone and called Okafor immediately. His voice was unnervingly steady, belying the tectonic shock cracking open beneath his feet. He spoke only four words, and the heavy, suffocating silence that answered him on the other end confirmed what Okafor had already suspected for two years—too terrified, or too blindly loyal to a family he had served for decades, to ever say it first.

Leanor dropped the phone onto the desk. He looked at his father's steady, unyielding eyes in the silver frame, then thought of Martha’s cruel voice echoing in the diner: You were never enough for me. A cold, hollow ache settled deep into his bones. His brother hadn't just stolen a company; Luke had spent two years constructing a monumental, murderous lie with their father's very corpse buried at its foundation.

Whatever came next, this was no longer a petty corporate war over an inheritance. It was a blood debt, older and infinitely heavier than money, and Leanor intended to collect every single drop, no matter how much of his own soul it cost him to burn it all down.

He didn't sleep. Instead, he pulled up the personnel files for the lending subsidiary, ruthlessly cross-referencing every name associated with the forged approvals against employment dates, abrupt promotions, and inflated salaries that defied ordinary corporate performance reviews.

Three names had been stealthily elevated within months of the fraud starting. Each promotion was small enough to bypass board scrutiny, and each one, Leanor now realized with absolute clarity, was a paid-off accomplice.

He printed out the list, sliding it across the desk to rest directly beside his father's photograph. The two pieces of paper lay together like pieces of a blood-stained puzzle, whispering a dark truth he was only now learning how to translate.

Somewhere buried in that dossier was the final name Okafor had been too terrified to utter aloud. And as the digital clock on his computer ticked relentlessly toward zero, Leanor felt a cold, lethal surge of gratitude for the seventy-two hours Luke had handed him. It was precisely enough time to unearth the truth before his brother could bury it forever.