Chapter 3: The Mask of Innocence
A month had passed since the funeral.
The town had moved on.
But Dorian had not.
He walked through the streets like a ghost in the daylight—dressed in black, eyes calm, voice soft. People whispered, "Poor boy," and offered him fake smiles wrapped in sympathy. They never noticed the flicker of rage in his eyes, the calculating silence behind every kind nod.
He had mastered It now—the mask.
To them, he was still the grieving heir. Quiet, polite, harmless. But inside, something had been born the night he lost everything. Something cold and methodical. He no longer cried in the shadows; he planned.
And the first on his list was Mr. Hawthorne, his father's oldest friend. The one who held the knife that tore his family apart.
Dorian started by digging. Every deal, every bank account, every person connected to Hawthorne—he unearthed them all with a chilling kind of obsession. And then, he smiled. Because Hawthorne's empire was built on debt, lies, and people too scared to speak the truth.
But Dorian wasn't scared.
He started small.
A whisper here, a rumor there. Subtle suggestions to reporters, quiet conversations with business rivals. It didn't take long. Like the scent of blood in the water, the world turned on Hawthorne just as easily as it had turned on "orian.
Soon, headlines screamed about fraud. Investors vanished. His company bled out slowly, and no one offered a hand to stop the bleeding.
But the best part?
Hawthorne still didn't know who was behind it.
Dorian visited him one rainy afternoon, just as the man's mansion was being seized.
Hawthorne opened the door with hollow eyes, a shell of the man he used to be. And Dorian… he smiled sweetly.
"Mr. Hawthorne," he said, voice laced with sympathy, "I just came to say… I'm so sorry for your loss."
And he meant every word—but not in the way Hawthorne thought.
After that, the mask stayed on. It became his best weapon. He attended charity events, smiled at cameras, even comforted people who cried on his shoulder. All the while, he was dismantling the world that had destroyed him—piece by piece.
But late at night, when the world was quiet, Dorian would sit in the rose garden, the one his mother used to tend.
And for just a moment, the mask would slip.
He would stare at the stars and whisper, "I'm doing this for you. For all of us."
And the night would whisper back in silence, wrapping him in its cold embrace.
He was no longer a boy.
He was the storm they never saw coming