Silly Campus Boy Is The Biggest Heir

Chapter 8: Seventy-Two Hours

The board reconvened at the exact hour Luke himself had set. The same polished glass table, the same watchful, cynical faces. Luke arrived supremely confident, expecting to spend his allotted time presenting a fabricated case against his brother's character that would end the matter permanently.

Instead, Leanor requested the floor first.

The chairwoman, still visibly shaken from the revelation of their father's true will and the seventeen hidden companies, granted it without a second's hesitation, waving away Luke's sharp protest with a single, authoritative hand.

Leanor laid the forged signatures across the mahogany table one by one, sliding them into the open space alongside the unauthorized loans and the incriminating four-day gap between their father's sudden discovery of the fraud and his violent death. He let each devastating document sit in absolute, crushing silence for a full breath before turning to the next.

He didn't accuse Luke outright. He didn't need to. He simply let the undeniable paper trail speak, watching the board's collective expression shift from guarded confusion to a dawning, horrified comprehension. Across the table, a senior executive’s hand rose slowly to cover her trembling mouth.

The chairwoman's voice shook when she finally broke the silence. "Luke. Explain the signature."

Luke's immaculate mask—worn flawlessly for two long years—slipped completely. The expensive pen in his hand cracked clean down the middle under the sudden, furious pressure of his grip. But he didn't panic the way Leanor half expected. Instead, his face twisted into something far more dangerous, rawer, and more honest than anything he had ever shown the room.

"You think I wanted this?" His voice fractured violently on the word wanted, tearing through the quiet boardroom with a desperate, ragged edge that made even Leanor's breath catch. "I spent two years trying to be good enough to earn what should have already been mine by blood. Do you know what that does to a man's soul?"

It wasn't quite a confession. It wasn't quite a denial, either. The suffocating ambiguity of it hung over the table like thick smoke, leaving every person in the room—Leanor included—uncertain of just how far his older brother had truly gone to ensure their father never finished that fatal audit. A heavy, sickening dread coiled in Leanor’s chest as he realized Luke might have crossed a line from which there was no returning.

Outside the boardroom, a completely different kind of chaos was exploding across the ground floor.

Chase Callum, desperate and thoroughly unraveled by the catastrophic collapse of his life, had finally learned the truth through a leaked rumor circulating across campus: Leo the waiter and Leanor Prime were the exact same man.

Blinded by humiliation and rage, Chase had stormed past the front security desk uninvited. His tie was loosened, his eyes bloodshot from a night of heavy drinking, and a pair of anxious security guards trailed him at a careful distance the moment he violently pushed through the revolving doors.

He cornered Leanor in the hallway the microsecond the board session broke. Fury and shame had twisted Chase's features into something unrecognizable from the arrogant, untouchable boy who had snapped his fingers at table twelve.

"You destroyed my family for sport!" Chase hissed, stepping close enough for Leanor to smell the sour stench of stale alcohol clinging to his jacket. "You knew exactly who I was, and you did this anyway. You just stood there and let me humiliate you!"

Leanor's response came out deadly quiet, absolutely devoid of mercy—the voice of a man who had spent two grueling years learning the brutal, unyielding weight of cause and effect.

"I didn't destroy your family, Chase. I simply stopped funding the hollow lie you were living," Leanor said, his eyes flat and cold as glass. "Your father did the rest two years ago when he went bankrupt, kept you pretending nothing had changed, and taught you how to forge a signature to keep the lights on."

Security finally moved in, pinning Chase’s arms and forcibly escorting him toward the exit. The fight evaporated from him instantly, going out of him the way it always does when a desperate boy hears his own meticulously built house of cards described with absolute, merciless accuracy for the very first time.

That was the exact moment the air in the lobby changed.

A sharp, breathless gasp cut through the echoing marble hall, and every head whipped around.

Martha stood frozen just past the entrance. She had come downtown to confront Leo about the anonymous financial aid, having finally traced the funds through eighteen months of hyper-specific gifts, only to hit a brick wall of unimaginable reality.

She stared at the sprawling, opulent lobby. At the men in bespoke Italian suits. At the heavy security lanyards reading PRIME hanging around every guard's neck. And finally, her horrified gaze locked onto Leanor—standing tall in a tailored suit, a face she barely recognized in this blinding light, in this towering skyscraper that belonged to him because his blood was written into its very foundations.

Her voice broke on a single syllable, small and fragile in a room built for echoes:

"Leo?"

The massive lobby seemed to hold its collective breath, the air turning ice-cold between them. Somewhere behind Martha, a security guard shifted uncomfortably, entirely unsure whether to intervene or vanish into the walls.

Leanor turned fully to face her. For one unguarded, agonizing second, every carefully engineered layer of armor he had worn through the boardroom, through Chase, and through Luke fractured completely. He looked, just for that fleeting heartbeat, like the exhausted, tender-eyed boy who used to carry her textbooks between classes—before either of them understood the heavy, jagged toll the real world would demand of them.

"Martha," he said, her name coming out rougher than intended, snagging painfully on something sharp in his throat. "I can explain."

"Can you?" She hadn't moved an inch. She hadn't stepped closer, nor had she retreated—caught between the violent gravitational pull of who she thought he was and the terrifying stranger standing before her, making her whole body look brittle, like glass on the verge of shattering. Her frantic eyes swept over the security badges, the tailored lapels, and the polished marble floor beneath his shoes. "Because right now, it looks like there's a hell of a lot you never bothered to tell me. Was any of it even real?"

A junior executive hurried past them carrying a towering stack of files, throwing an intensely curious glance their way before ducking into the stairwell. The intrusion snapped Martha back to reality. She realized, with a sudden wave of humiliating exposure, just how horribly public this gleaming marble lobby truly was.

Her jaw tightened, locking into a hard, defensive line.

"Not here," she whispered, her voice dropping lower, the initial shock curdling into a bitter, defensive armor of her own. She looked at him with eyes that held a lifetime of unspent tears and a deep, aching betrayal that cut deeper than any boardroom ambush ever could. "Somewhere private. You owe me that much, at least."

Leanor swallowed hard, nodding once with a heavy, leaden ache in his chest. He gestured toward a small, sterile conference room tucked just off the lobby, a quiet, glass-walled space usually reserved for nervous vendors waiting on meetings that never materialized.

He held the door open for her. Martha walked past him without lifting her eyes to his face, brushing close enough that he caught the familiar, haunting scent of her shampoo, the exact floral fragrance he used to fall asleep dreaming of while staring up at the ceiling of his cramped, lonely apartment.

The heavy glass door clicked shut behind them, sealing them off from the rest of the world, leaving them to face the wreckage of everything they had built in the dark.