The lie was a ghost between us, and it had just learned how to speak.
The silence in the car after her question was a physical entity, thick and suffocating. Lysander had gone so still beside her he might have been carved from marble. Elara's words — "Then why does my father scream that it was a blood pact?"
— hung in the air, a poison gas that had seeped into the sealed luxury of the vehicle and stripped the heat from the charged moment they'd just shared.
He didn't look at her. His gaze was fixed on the rain-streaked window, but she knew he wasn't seeing the glittering city. He was seeing a decade-old ledger, his father's signature, and the foundation of his entire world cracking open.
When the car arrived at the penthouse, he exited without a word, without a backward glance. The elevator ride was a mausoleum of unspoken accusations. The doors opened into his stark, minimalist domain, and he strode directly to his private study, the door closing behind him with a soft, definitive click that echoed through the vast space like a gunshot.
Elara was left standing alone in the cavernous living room, the ghost of his kiss still burning on her lips, the chill of his withdrawal freezing her to the bone.
Inside the study, Lysander braced his hands on his steel desk, head bowed, his breathing a ragged thing he couldn't control. A blood pact. The words were absurd, melodramatic. The ramblings of a sick, guilty old man. The Aethelred deal had been a straightforward, if aggressive, shipping acquisition. Clean. Profitable. His father had told him so. It was the deal that had saved them, until Silas Vance's embezzlement had bled them dry in the aftermath.
"It was clean," he had told her, the certainty in his voice a shield against the sudden, insidious doubt.
But now, in the quiet of his mind, a single, treacherous question echoed: Was it?
He crossed to the wall-sized screen, his fingers flying across the keyboard with a frantic energy. He bypassed the standard corporate archives—the sanitized, public records. He went deeper, into the encrypted, legacy servers that held the raw, unedited data from his father's era. The era of handwritten notes and scanned documents before Blackwood Global had become the sleek, digital behemoth he had built.
He pulled up the Aethelred file. The official documentation was there, neat and orderly. But his eyes, trained for a decade to find the weakness in any system, the flaw in any contract, snagged on the periphery. A scanned memo, a shipping manifest with a routing number that made no sense for a standard commercial vessel, a list of "consultancy fees" paid to a shell corporation that had been dissolved two weeks after the deal was finalized.
Small things. Inconsequential on their own. But together, they formed a pattern he had been blind to because he had never thought to look. He had accepted his father's narrative as gospel. His revenge against the Vances had been the bedrock of his existence, the fuel for his ambition. To question it was to risk the entire structure of his life collapsing into rubble.
A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck. He opened another file, the personnel records from that year. He found the digital copy of the damning financial report, the one that had sent his family into a tailspin, the one signed by Silas Vance that had authorized the massive, unauthorized transfer of funds.
He zoomed in on the signature line.
For ten years, he had seen only the name: Silas Vance. The scrawl of the man who had betrayed them.
But now, he looked past the name. He looked at the document itself, the font, the formatting. And then he pulled up a verified document he knew was his father's—a board meeting minutes sheet from the same week, signed by Alistair Blackwood.
His blood ran cold.
The flourish on the capital 'A'. The specific weight of the downstroke on the 'B'. They were identical.
He superimposed the two signatures. They were a perfect match.
The report that had ruined his family, the evidence that had condemned Silas Vance… it hadn't been signed by Silas Vance at all.
He stared at a financial report from a decade ago, a line item circled in red. It was signed by Alistair Blackwood, not Silas Vance.