2026-01-04 21:58:44
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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
Chapter 316
Vance gave a sharp nod and disappeared.Robert turned back to the pedestal, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. He leaned close to the ring, his breath fogging the cold metal. "If you have played me for a fool," he whispered to the empty room, a promise of violence in every syllable, "you will learn that your mother's fate will seem like a mercy compared to yours."In the cell, the unnatural stillness that had followed the strange phenomena was shattered by the sound of heavy, hurried footsteps in the corridor. A key scraped in the lock. The door burst open.Vance stood there, his expression unreadable. "You. Come. Now." He pointed at Wilfreda.Helsin instinctively moved in front of her daughter. "Where are you taking her?"Vance ignored her, his gaze locked on Wilfreda. "Don't make me drag you."Wilfreda met her mother's terrified eyes, giving a slight, reassuring shake of her head she didn't feel. The abrupt summons, the tension in Vance's posture—it wasn't about verificat
Chapter 315
The heart of the Obsidian Citadel was a chamber that felt older than the stone around it. It was circular, windowless, and lit by recessed crimson lights that gleamed off the polished black walls. In the center, on a pedestal of obsidian that seemed to drink the light, lay the three O’Connor relics: the necklace, the bracelet, and the newly acquired Aurelian ring.Robert stood before them, his breath shallow with anticipation. This was the culmination of a lifetime of plotting, of seething in the shadow of his brother’s legacy. He had followed the obscure family lore, deciphered the codes hidden in their father’s journals. The unification ritual was not about mystical incantations, but about precise alignment, about completing a circuit that had been broken for decades.With meticulous, almost reverent care, he arranged them. The necklace formed a circle. The bracelet was placed within it, its clasp touching the pendant. Finally, the Aurelian ring was set at the precise central point
Chapter 314
By the time Judge Henderson gaveled the day's session to a close, the trial had fully metastasized into a media circus. Satellite trucks clogged the streets around the courthouse; pundits on every network dissected Ava Rennet’s “brilliant” seeding of reasonable doubt and Sandy Thorne’s “clinical but heartless” forensic presentation.The public narrative, once a simple story of a fallen president’s crime, had splintered and reformed. Online forums and news segments now buzzed with words like “conspiracy,” “frame-up,” and “political assassination.” Julia O’Connor was being recast from a murderer into a tragic figure—a woman besieged by a venomous family and shadowy enemies. The icy, factual case of the state now felt like a weapon being wielded by the very forces that had hounded her.In the bustling hallway outside the courtroom, a temporary order was established. Christopher O’Connor, granted bail under strict conditions, was whisked away by his lawyers, his head down, avoiding the s
Chapter 313
The air in the courtroom, still buzzing from Ava’s surgical dismantling of Christopher’s credibility, grew thick with anticipation as Sandy Thorne rose to reclaim the narrative. She could not undo the bias now staining her star witness, but she could bulldoze through it with cold, hard science.As a lawyer facing one of the best in the field, she knew her best shot as it stood at that moment was to rewrite the narrative, and to do that, she needed another witness to come to the witness stand.“Your Honor, the state calls Dr. Alistair Finch, head of forensic pathology for the county.”A stern, meticulous man in his sixties took the stand. Sandy led him through his findings with the precision of a surgeon: time of death consistent with Christopher’s account, the single gunshot wound, the bullet recovered matching the caliber of the handgun found at the scene which according to them was registered to Julia.“And the gun itself, Doctor,” Sandy asked, her voice confident. “Were you able to
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