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Chapter 322
Before Gary could reply, the soft purr of a different engine echoed from a side access tunnel. A modest, dark sedan glided to a stop a few yards away. The door opened, and a man in his early to late fifties stepped out. He was tall, slightly stooped, with a mane of silver hair and eyes that held a lifetime of meticulous study behind wire-rimmed glasses. He carried an old leather satchel.Adams Smith.He approached Frederick Wheler, and the two men exchanged a handshake that was more than a greeting—it was a silent transfer of weight, a reaffirmation of a decades-old pact. No words were needed.Smith then nodded to Gary, a brief, assessing glance. "Gary. Thank you for facilitating this."Before Gary could respond, the main entrance tunnel filled with the sound of Chance's powerful car. It pulled into the pool of light and stopped. The doors opened.Chance stepped out, his eyes immediately scanning the scene, taking in Gary, the imposing figure of Frederick Wheler, and the unfamiliar y
Chapter 321
Chance’s phone buzzed on the side table, a jarring intrusion in the intimate space they’d carved out of the worry. He glanced at the screen. Gary.The timing felt like a physical tug, yanking him from the theoretical to the immediate. He answered, keeping his voice low. “Gary.”“Chance. We need to meet. It’s urgent.” Gary’s voice was tight, stripped of its usual steady calm. There was an undercurrent of something raw—not fear, but a grim, pressing intensity.“Where are you?”“The secure lot under the old shipping warehouse. Can you come now?”Chance’s eyes met Chloe’s. She was watching him, already reading the shift in his posture, the naew focus in his gaze. “I’ll be there in twenty.”He ended the call and stood, the moment of quiet contemplation over. The waiting was done.“Who is that?” Chloe asked, though she’d clearly heard one side of the conversation.“It’s Gary,” Chance said, already moving to retrieve his jacket from the back of a chair. “He says there’s something he needs to
Chapter 320
“What was that?” Christopher demanded, his voice low and seething. “In there? That wasn’t a cross-examination, it was a public flaying! She made me look like a jealous, scheming idiot, and you just… let it happen!”Sandy remained seated behind her desk, her hands steepled, projecting a calm she did not feel. “Sir, I understand your frustration. Ava Rennet is a formidable opponent. She exploited the family history angle, which was a known vulnerability. Our strength is the forensics, the physical evidence. We’ll pivot back to that.”“Pivot?” Christopher stopped, slapping his hands on the glass surface of her desk, making her flinch. “You don’t pivot when your star witness is turned into the prosecution’s best argument! The reason we hired you—the reason my father is paying your astronomical fees—is to win. Not to ‘pivot’ and hope the jury forgets that my testimony now smells like sour grapes and a decades-old inheritance fight!”He leaned in, his face flushed. “Did you see her? Ava? Sh
Chapter 319
The meeting was held at a place which Richard had chosen; a private viewing room at the most austere modern art gallery in the city, which was closed to the general public. It was an area of cold concrete, glare and a single, bloody splash of color upon a large white wall--a metaphor which Richard must have admired.Richard was already there standing before the picture, with his back turned, when Robert came into the room. He was dressed so well that he appeared to be an outcast of the dust in the air. The gulf of years and philosophy in the gap between him and Robert, was felt by the latter in his custom-crafted, though less rigorous costume.Richard turned. Time had drawn its own fine cold lines down his face, but the eyes were the same--cold, cold, without pity. There was a long period when the brothers just gazed at each other. It was the last face-to-face meeting, and Steven had simply just disappeared, and they had been the competitors on a crumbling kingdom."Robert." There was
Chapter 318
The weight of the discovery, of his own erased identity, settled in Robert’s gut like a block of ice. The cold was clarifying. All the old jealousies, the competitions with Richard, the fury at their father—they were the struggles of phantoms, fighting over a legacy that was never theirs. The only thing real was the power locked away in the vault. And the only person who could open it now was Chance.He needed a new strategy. And for that, he needed the only other person who truly understood the nature of their exile, the shared wound of being Alfred’s beloved imposters.He pulled a burner phone from his pocket, a relic from a past collaboration. A number he hadn’t dialed in over a decade. After Steven’s believed death, they had tried, briefly, to be brothers united in their sudden, unwanted inheritance. It had lasted less than a year. Their ambitions were too different, their methods too opposed. Richard sought to erase the O’Connor name with scandal and financial cannibalization. R
Chapter 317
The silence in the vaulted archive was thick with the ghosts of a scorned lineage. Robert sat amidst the detritus of his father's life—ledgers bound in cracked leather, journals with pages yellowed by time and bitterness. The failure of the ritual had stripped him of triumph, leaving behind a raw, intellectual hunger. The power was real; he had felt its breath. So why had it recoiled?The answer, he was certain, lay in Alfred O'Connor's own meticulous, spiteful hand.He found it not in a grand grimoire, but in a margin note in a ledger tracking mining yields from 1962. The ink was faded but the words were a dagger to the heart of his ambition: "The vault accepts only the true lineage. The blood is the signature. The Living Key."A blood lock. Robert's lip curled. Of course his father, that obsessed dynast, would sew such a fail-safe into his greatest treasure. It was the ultimate act of exclusion.Driven by a new, colder fury, Robert began a different search. Not for ritual instructi
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