The Cohen family estate felt less like a home and more like a crime
scene Julian was now licensed to investigate. Arthur's study had yielded its
cold, structural truth. But it was the private west wing, the domain of Vivian
Cohen, his "mother," that held the intimate horror.
He'd waited until the house was silent, the staff dismissed for the
night. He stood outside the door to her private sitting room, a space he'd
rarely entered as a child—it was always vaguely perfumed, meticulously ordered,
and emotionally off-limits. The motherly warmth he'd craved had never emanated
from here; it had been a stage for carefully timed hugs and public smiles.
The lock was a simple antique, picked with ease using skills Steven had
perhaps genetically bequeathed him. The room inside was a museum of tasteful
detachment. Silk upholstery, curated art, not a single photograph out of place.
And there, behind a bland watercolour of the Thames, was the wall safe.
His hands were steady. The anger was a frozen lake now, solid enough to
bear his weight. The combination was a guess—the date of Arthur and Vivian's
wedding, an event she treated as her personal founding myth. The lock clicked
open.
Inside was not jewellery or cash. It was archives. Neat, labeled
folders. His heart hammered against the ice.
The first was marked E.C. - Disposition. He pulled it out. Inside were
black-and-white photographs of a young, stunningly beautiful woman with sad,
intelligent eyes. Elora. Not as a faded ghost in a Swiss clinic, but vibrant,
alive, caught laughing in a garden, looking pensively out a window. There were
medical records from her confinement, cold clinical notes on her "delicate
mental state." And a copy of the finalised adoption papers, with Vivian's own
signature—bold, assured—next to Arthur's.
She hadn't just been a bystander. She had been a signatory. A
co-architect of the lie.
But it was the next folder that stopped the blood in his veins.
Succession - Contingencies.
He opened it. On top were his own school reports, his university
transcripts, psychological evaluations from his teens—all annotated in Vivian's
precise script. "Excessive empathy for a leadership role." "Questioned
authority in Debate Club—requires correction." "Demonstrates Steven's
impulsivity." She had been auditing him, not as a son, but as a product. A
potentially flawed replacement part.
Beneath his own history were gynaecological records. Vivian's. Dates
spanning the last fifteen years. And then, recent documents from a high-end,
discreet fertility clinic in Geneva. Initial consultations from two years ago.
Hormone therapy schedules. And finally, a completed IVF cycle report, dated
just nine months ago. The outcome: Successful implantation.
The world telescoped to the stark, typed words on the crisp paper. The
math was brutal, devastating. Around the time Steven had been shot and
vanished, around the time Robert's empire began its final, noisy collapse,
Vivian had quietly begun the process of creating a new heir. A biological one.
One with no taint of Steven, no connection to the tragic Elora, no inconvenient
empathy or impulsive fire.
He stumbled back, the folder spilling its contents onto the Persian rug.
The photographs of Elora fanned out, her eyes seeming to watch him. The IVF
success report lay on top, a sterile, white flag planted on the battlefield of
his identity.
A torrent of memories, now viewed through this lens of grotesque
calculation, assaulted him.
Memory: Age ten. He'd won a poetry prize at school, a secret passion.
Vivian had found the poem. Her response hadn't been disapproval, but a puzzled,
distant smile. "How… creative, darling. But your father expects your name on
the Regatta trophy next term. Focus on strengths that matter."
Memory: A year ago. A rare family dinner. He'd argued with Arthur about
an ethical boundary in a Southeast Asia deal. Vivian had listened, sipping her
wine, then said softly, "Your passion is commendable, Julian, but it's so
wearing. The world isn't a philosophy seminar." Later, he'd overheard her on
the phone: "...yes, the instability is concerning. We may need to consider
longer-term stability plans..."
He'd thought it was about the business. It was about him.
She had known. She had always known what he was—the living symbol of her
husband's first marriage's failure, of his brother's transgression. She had
accepted him as a necessary placeholder, a PR solution to infertility, while
she and Arthur worked on a permanent, biological fix. And when Steven's chaos
and Robert's meltdown threatened the stability of the empire, they had
accelerated their plan. They were replacing him.
The coldness wasn't a lack of maternal instinct. It was a deliberate
withholding. He was a tenant in a room being prepared for a new, true heir.
A sound escaped him—a dry, heaving retch of pure despair. He fell to his
knees among the scattered papers, his fingers brushing Elora's photograph. His
real mother, broken and discarded. And his adoptive mother, who had coolly
documented his flaws while growing a replacement in a lab.
He was not a son. He was a failed prototype.
The horror was too vast for rage. It filled him like a gas, leaving him
weightless and numb. He gathered the papers with robotic efficiency, placing
them back in the safe except for the IVF report and one photograph of Elora. He
needed the evidence. He needed to make it real for the others.
As he closed the safe, his eye caught a final, small leather-bound book
tucked in the back. He pulled it out. Vivian's personal journal. He opened it
at random, his eyes scanning the elegant, heartless script.
"The boy is too much like him today. That restless energy. Arthur is
displeased. The Geneva procedure cannot come soon enough. A clean start. Our
own blood. Our own story."
He snapped the book shut. The final nail.
Leaving the room as silently as he entered, the proof in his inner
pocket felt like a radioactive core burning against his chest. He walked
through the hollow, opulent halls of the only home he'd ever known, now
revealed as a beautifully appointed lie.
He didn't go to his own rooms. He went straight to the garage, got in
his car, and drove. He had no destination. But his hands, acting on an instinct
deeper than thought, turned the wheel toward the one place where the truth,
however terrible, was being assembled: Aeterna Tower.
He needed to show them. He needed Elara to see the full, unvarnished
cruelty of the machine that had created them both. And he needed Silas to
understand the true enemy wasn't just a vengeful ghost in the shadows. It was
also the cold, clinical architects in the light, who saw children as
liabilities and bloodlines as spreadsheets. The fight was no longer just about
exposing Steven. It was about dismantling the entire, rotten structure. And he
had just found its blueprint.