Chapter 12. Buried Truths and New Wars
The journal weighed more than it should have.
Elara gripped it tightly as she rode the elevator back to the estate, its pages humming with secrets that seemed to pulse against her skin. She hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours, yet her mind was electric, overcharged with adrenaline, grief, and an awakening hunger that no one, not even Damien, had ever seen in her before.
In the safety of her father’s study, she locked the door and laid the journal flat on the desk. The pages were brittle but preserved. Lines of his handwriting sloped with precision, filled with formulas, initials, and cryptic references that demanded decoding.
She didn’t need to read far to understand one thing:
The collapse of Vance Corp wasn’t a tragedy. It was a silencing.
And her father had known it was coming.
Elsewhere in the city, Damien stood before his mother in the Blackwood manor’s atrium. The glass ceiling filtered dawn light over marble floors. Isadora Blackwood looked every inch the sovereign she fancied herself, a vision in charcoal gray, her expression unmovable.
"You gave her the drive," she said, not a question.
Damien’s jaw clenched. "She deserved the truth."
"You’ve compromised everything."
"I’ve balanced it."