Kasim
A week.
Seven days since Eldora walked out of the boardroom, and every second since has felt like a thorn twisting beneath my skin.
As I got dressed, my mind was already at the office, eager for Jameson's update. I was pulling on my jacket, ready to leave, when a gentle voice stopped me.
"Kasim dear, won't you eat first?" Mrs Peters stood in the doorway, her eyes holding a softness that belonged to a world I'd burned down years ago.
"No, sorry, I have a lot of- "
"I knew you would say that," she interrupted, a soft smile on her face. "So l had a breakfast prepared. It's waiting with Alex in the car."
I couldn't help but smile back. She knows me too well. Almost as well as...
No.
I cut the thought off. "Thank you," I said, giving her a quick side hug before striding out. I couldn't afford the luxury of memory. Not today.
I slipped into the backseat of the car, the partition already up, and drowned myself in the cold light of my tablet, letting the workload burn away everything else.
At Marlowe Global, My tower swallowed me whole. The lobby, the elevator, the hall-all just a blur on the way to the only room that mattered.
Jameson was a statue by my office door, my assistant a flutter of words at his side.
Her updates about mergers and markets were just noise. I nodded, never breaking stride, and pushed into the quiet of my sanctuary.
We entered my office. She finished, placed a folder on the desk, and left. The door clicked shut with finality.
Silence.
"Report," I said, turning to Jameson.
"Yes, sir." He opened his file. "When she disappeared seven years ago, it was on her father's order. But she didn't just hide. She completed her studies and began intensive private training under a retired general aris. She learned military strategy, firearms, advanced combat, and political theory.
Constantly. For years. She was being forged into a weapon."
The data painted a new picture. Not a shattered princess. A soldier in the dark, being forged in fire.
"Why?"
I asked.
"That led me back to your case, sir. The allegations of treason against the crown." Jameson's voice grew sharper. "I found evidence. A large sum of money was transferred from an offshore shell company to a key official in Crowcrest at that precise time. The payment lines up perfectly with the man who first branded you a threat."
The air in the room turned to ice. The past seven years of my life-the fury, the drive, the very foundation of this tower-tilted on its axis.
"Someone framed you," Jameson stated, giving voice to the tectonic shift in my reality
I'd always known I was innocent. What I hadn't known was that my ruin was a purchased lie. The official didn't just believe rumors; he was paid to create them.
Someone had bought my ruin.
And if the lie was bought... then Eldora didn't just believe it.
She saw it being manufactured.
The air in my office vanished. A high, silent ringing started in my ears, drowning out the hum of the city below.
She was the smartest person I'd ever met.
She wouldn't have believed some made-up story.
My mind raced, rearranging seven years of history in a heartbeat. The pieces-the bought testimony, her sudden disappearance, her years of warrior's training-snapped together with a sound that was almost physical.
It wasn't a rumor. It was a plot. A transaction.
And she knew.
Eldora, who could spot a liar at fifty paces, who challenged every easy answer l ever gave... A sharp pain lanced through my temple. She would have seen the forgery in their "evidence" a mile away. Her father must have shown her this proof-this paid contract for my destruction.
My knees unlocked. I caught myself against the edge of the desk, the cold marble biting into my palm. He didn't convince her. He showed her the knife at my throat and gave her the choice: my heart or my neck.
She chose my neck.
The truth was not a revelation; it was a structural collapse. The man I'd built myself into-the ruthless CEO, the unfeeling king-had been constructed on a single, sacred fury: her betrayal. Now that foundation was gone, and I was free-falling through the hollow space it left behind.
She let me hate her to keep me alive.
A sound tore from my throat, raw and stifled, the expulsion of a poison I'd been nursing for years. She chose to let me live, even if it meant I would hate her.
The understanding wasn't a vise around my chest; it was the chest itself caving in. Seven years of fury, directed at a shadow.
The wrong shadow.
I looked at my hand, still splayed white-knuckled on the desk. It was trembling.
The hand that signed billion-dollar deals, that had built an empire of spite... it was shaking.
In the reflective black surface, my own eyes stared back-hollow, unfamiliar. The eyes of a man who had just discovered the war he'd been fighting was against a ghost, while the real enemy had been drafting the peace treaty over his grave.
The anger I'd carried for seven years didn't disappear. It changed. Part of it turned into a cold, sharp point aimed at the stranger who did this. The other part... it stayed for her. For not fighting with me. For deciding my fate without me.
"Find who paid," I said, my voice rough.
"The trail is hidden. But the money started in the Kingdom of Narva."
Narva. A name that meant nothing to me an hour ago.
"Continue the investigation, I want to know who is hiding in the shadows."
"There's a new development," Jameson added, placing a second item on the desk: a thick, cream-colored envelope sealed with wax. "Crowncrest is hosting an opening gala in three days. It formally commences the state visit of Prince Lance of Narva. An invitation was sent to you."
A foreign prince.
From Narva.
Arriving now, years after money from his kingdom was used to destroy me.
The coincidence was a siren, blaring in the silent room. It wasn't proof. But it was a target.
I picked up the invitation, the wax crest of the Owden lion cold under my thumb.
A slow, deliberate calm settled over me. The restless thorn was gone. In its place was a single, sharp point of focus.
"How convenient," I said, the words dropping into the silence like stones. "Ensure I have a complete dossier on Prince Lance by tonight. His public history, his private habits, his kingdom's true financial state. I want to know what he wants."
"Understood, sir."
As Jameson left, I turned the invitation over in my hands. The gala wasn't a social event.
It was the next move on a board I was only just beginning to see.
Let the Prince have his welcome party. Let him smile and charm and play the perfect prince.
I would be the shadow at the edge of the light, watching. Calculating. Waiting for him—for Eldora to make the first mistake that would turn my suspicion into certainty.
The first war was built on a misunderstanding.
This new one would be fought with the truth.