Eleanor's confession was small, private, and jagged. They met at the old family estate—the place where portraits watched you grow calloused. She offered him tea with the same steady hands that had offered absolution all her life.
"What did you do?" he asked, not hiding the accusation.
Eleanor did not blink. "We made contingency plans, Adrian. We always did. A family without an heir is a house without a roof."
He named the ledger he'd seen, the padded corners of adoption files, the times someone rerouted correspondence. She listened like a historian and then, slowly, like a woman tired of protection.
"You don't understand what I had to do to keep Liao Holdings from being eaten," she said. "I made choices. Some were cruel. Some were necessary."
"Did you put a child into that choice?" he asked. The question was hot and unwilling.
Eleanor's fingers found the rim of her teacup. "We placed a girl as a shield in case heirs were contested. We were not malicious. We were terrified."
Adrian felt like a man reading the inventory of a room he'd been told didn't exist. The problem was not only that they had used a child; it was that nobody had expected the child to be human in the ways that matter.
The ledger that Elena had provided—Elena now under protection in a safe house—had names and signatures pointing to a legal firm that had handled the placement. The firm had since been dissolved; its partners were either dead or untraceable.
Mei learned the barest of the truth: she might be connected to the Liao line through paperwork —or she might be exactly what Victor said: a planted decoy. The ambiguity was the point; someone had designed the confusion to be a blade you could twist.
She felt betrayed by every adult who had ever spoken on her behalf. Yet she also felt something stranger: a strange, hollow ache at the possibility that she might—maybe—be connected to a family whose ugly compromises had nearly snared her.
Cliffhanger: Eleanor produces a sealed envelope from a drawer and says, "There's one name in here you must see. But I cannot open it for you." The envelope bears a child's scrawl of a name Mei doesn't recognize—one that will make Victor move faster.