The call came to Elara's Swiss hotel room just past ten in the evening.
The concierge, sounding flustered, announced a Mr. Cohen was in the lobby,
insisting on seeing her. Silas, who had been reviewing the clinic's blueprints,
was on his feet instantly, a hand moving to the small of his back where a
weapon was always discreetly holstered.
"It's a trap," he said, his voice low. "He knows we're here. He's trying
to flank us before we see her."
Elara stood by the window, looking down at the quiet, lamp-lit street.
The confrontation she had braced for was with a ghost in a clinic, not the
living, breathing consequence of that ghost's tragedy. But she felt a strange
certainty. "No. Not a trap. He's not here as a Cohen."
"How can you know that?"
"Because if he were," she said, turning to meet his gaze, "he'd have
sent lawyers, or security, or a writ. He wouldn't be standing alone in a lobby
at night. He'd be performing. He's not performing."
She made the decision. "I'll see him. In the library lounge. It's quiet,
public, but not too public. You can watch from the bar."
Silas's jaw tightened, but he nodded. He trusted her instincts, even
when they terrified him.
Julian stood by the fireplace in the wood-panelled library lounge, a
silhouette against the dying embers. He looked like he'd been pulled through a
knothole backwards. The impeccable suit was rumpled, his tie absent, his shirt
unbuttoned at the collar. He held a glass of amber liquor, untouched. When
Elara entered, he didn't turn with his usual theatrical grace. He just looked
at her, and the raw exposure in his eyes was like a physical blow.
"You found her," he said, his voice hoarse. It wasn't an accusation. It
was a statement of grim fact.
"We have an appointment tomorrow," Elara replied carefully, stopping a
safe distance away. The air between them crackled, but not with the old
animosity. It was charged with a shared, dreadful knowledge.
A bleak, hollow smile touched his lips. "Of course you do. The
relentless Elara Thorne. Digging up every buried thing." He finally took a sip
of the drink, wincing as if it were medicine. "I know about the witness form.
My mother's name. Elora."
Elara's breath caught. He knew that much.
"My father—Arthur," he corrected with vicious precision, "confirmed the
broad strokes. That Steven is my biological father. That I was a… transaction.
A problem solved." He swirled the liquid in his glass, his gaze fixed on the
vortex. "He made it sound like a corporate merger. An acquisition of human
assets. He was so… cold. I always thought it was just his way. Now I know it's
because he never saw me as a son. I was a salvaged piece of his brother's
wreckage. A living revenge."
He looked up at her then, and the torment in his grey eyes was
bottomless. "But you… you know more, don't you? Greta. The old maid. My network
is less… genteel than yours, but it's just as thorough. She spoke to you. She
told you about the first Elora."
Elara gave a single, slow nod. "She did."
The confirmation seemed to both destroy him and offer a perverse kind of
relief. The last pillar of the fiction crumbled. He wasn't just adopted. He was
the product of a love that broke his family, born to a woman who was then
erased. His entire life was a cover-up for a crime of the heart.
"I need you to understand something," he said, setting the glass down
with a sharp click. He took a step toward her, and Silas, from his post at the
bar, tensed. But Julian's hands were open, empty. "Everything I've done. The
obstruction. The warnings. The shadow games. I wasn't protecting the Cohen
fortune. I was protecting the lie. It was the only world I had. The only
identity I was given. I was… terrified of the silence that would be left if it
was taken away."
He ran a hand through his disheveled hair. "And Kore Tech… you have to
understand, it was never Robert's. Not really. It was Steven's. His pet
project, his playground, his weapon. Robert was the frontman, the chaotic,
greedy face of it. But the architecture, the purpose… it was all Steven. It was
how he built his shadow empire, separate from Arthur. How he amassed power,
waiting for the day he could use it to reclaim what was taken. To reclaim me,
or destroy Arthur trying. Every illegal transaction, every buried secret in
that ledger you're holding… it's a love letter written in poison. From a ghost
to a ghost."
The admission was monumental. It confirmed Silas's theories and rewrote
the entire history of their conflict. Kore Tech wasn't just a Hayes family sin;
it was Steven Cohen's life's work, his war chest in a battle against his
brother.
"Why are you telling me this now?" Elara asked, her voice soft but firm.
"You could have used this knowledge. Bargained with it."
"To what end?" he asked, a genuine, lost confusion in his tone. "To
preserve the lie a little longer? I'm so tired, Elara. I'm tired of being a
character in someone else's tragedy. I look at you, and you carry your mother's
torch. What do I carry? My father's bitterness? My other father's corruption? A
mother's grief I never even knew?"
He took another step closer, now just an arm's length away. The scent of
his cologne was undercut by the smell of cold night air and despair. "I have no
allies. No truth. I am the heir to nothing but a false flag. I came here… I
don't know what I'm doing here. But you have the ledger. You have the truth.
You're the only person standing in the same ruins as I am, just from the other
side of the wall."
He was no longer the polished adversary, the keeper of shadows. He was a
lost soul, adrift in the wreckage of his own identity. The confession about
Kore Tech wasn't a strategic play; it was an unloading. A desperate attempt to
hand her a piece of the truth, as if by sharing the burden, it might become
real, might become his.
"What do you want from me, Julian?" Elara asked.
He met her gaze, his own stark and open. "I don't know. Maybe just to
not be alone when the rest of it falls. Maybe to look at the woman who shares a
name with my mother, and see if she understands. Maybe… to ask you what I
should do."
The power dynamic had utterly inverted. The mighty Julian Cohen was
asking her for guidance. For a moment, Elara saw not the corporate prince, but
the little boy from the photograph, unknowingly trapped in a golden cage.
"Tomorrow," she said slowly, "we're going to see her. The first Elora.
You could come with us."
He flinched as if struck. The raw hope and terror that flashed across
his face was heartbreaking. "He'll have her guarded. He'll never allow it."
"We're not asking for his permission," Silas's voice cut through the
room. He had approached silently, his posture relaxed but his eyes missing
nothing. "We have a way in. It's risky. But if what you're saying is true, then
she's your mother. You have a right to see her. And she has a right to see
you."
Julian looked between them, the lost heir and the warrior couple, an
alliance that would have been unthinkable days before. He saw the resolve in
Elara's eyes, not fuelled by vengeance now, but by a fierce, protective
empathy. He saw the tactical certainty in Silas's.
He nodded, a single, jerky motion. "Alright." The word was a surrender
and a beginning. "What do you need me to do?"
For the first time, they were not on opposing sides. They were standing
together in the desolate, terrifying landscape of the truth, about to face the
source of it all. The lost son had come home, only to find home was a prison he
needed their help to break open.