The leak didn't come from a shadowy hacker or a vengeful ghost. It came,
with brutal simplicity, from a single encrypted email to the gossip editor of
The Metropolis, a scandal sheet masquerading as a society journal. The attached
documents were selective, damning, and perfectly tailored for maximum
destruction: the IVF clinic report with the Cohort J.C. footnote clearly
visible, a copy of Julian's early signature on the family biological repository
consent form, and a timeline drawing a stark line between the two.
The headline, splashed across the digital edition before dawn, was a
masterpiece of venomous implication: COHEN HEIR LOAN? Inside the Bizarre
'Bloodline Banking' Scandal Rocking the Dynasty.
It didn't state the full, horrific truth. It didn't need to. It provided
the facts—the repository, the IVF, the shared genetic source material—and let
the reader's imagination, fuelled by decades of whispered rumours about the
Cohens, do the rest. The article posed the questions in bold, italicised font:
Is the future Cohen heir actually the current heir's biological child? Did
socialite Vivian Cohen undergo fertility treatments using her own adopted son's
genetic material? What does patriarch Arthur Cohen know?
The effect was nuclear.
By breakfast, it was the lead story on every business and entertainment
news feed. The tawdry, almost Gothic horror of it transcended financial
scandal. It was a Shakespearean tragedy filtered through the lens of modern
biotechnology and primal family jealousy. The Cohen name, synonymous with
impenetrable, icy control, was now a byword for grotesque, tabloid-ready
madness.
In the Thorne penthouse, Elara watched the storm break on multiple
screens. Silas stood beside her, his arm around her shoulders. "Steven," he
said quietly. "He's burning it all down. He couldn't get to Arthur directly, so
he's destroying the thing Arthur values most: the family's immaculate
reputation. And he's using Vivian's own crime to do it."
"He's forcing Julian's hand into the open," Elara murmured, her hand
resting on her stomach. "And he's making sure Vivian can never use that child
as a clean heir. He's tainting the 'pure' line at its source."
Across the city, the Cohen empire was fracturing in real-time. On the
financial networks, Cohen Holdings' stock was in free-fall, not on the news of
illegal dealings, but on the perception of profound, destabilising insanity at
the very top. "How do you value a company," one analyst sputtered on air, "when
the succession plan appears to be a… a psychological thriller?"
At the estate, the gates were besieged by cameras. Inside, the silence
was absolute and suffocating. Arthur Cohen had locked himself in his study,
refusing all calls, even from his panicked board. His life's work—building an
edifice of respectability over a foundation of secrets—was crumbling because of
the most intimate, bizarre secret of all.
But it was Vivian who faced the fire first. She had made the
catastrophic error of keeping a long-standing lunch appointment at The Aviary,
the city's most exclusive dining club. Perhaps she believed her social armour
was impervious. Perhaps she was in a state of madness-induced denial.
She was met not by the usual deferential nods, but by a frozen, then
buzzing, silence. As she was shown to her usual table, a woman she'd served on
three charity committees with deliberately picked up her purse and moved to
another part of the room. A ripple of movement followed. By the time her
champagne cocktail arrived, she was sitting in a perfect, empty circle of
starched white tablecloths, the object of a hundred averted gazes and horrified
whispers.
The scene, captured by a paparazzo with a long lens through the club's
famed glass wall, said everything. The headline that afternoon: SOCIAL PARIAH:
Vivian Cohen Dines Alone.
Meanwhile, Julian made his move. He didn't hide. He walked directly into
the maelstrom. He called an emergency press conference outside the Cohen
Holdings tower at noon. He stood, pale but resolute, before a thicket of
microphones, the embodiment of the scandal.
"I have resigned from the board of Cohen Holdings and from all my family
roles, effective immediately," he stated, his voice clear and carrying no hint
of the tempest within. "The personal matters now circulating in the media are
just that—deeply personal, and profoundly painful. To protect all potentially
affected parties, especially an innocent child who may be born into these
circumstances, I will be making no further comment. My focus now is on
supporting those who have been victims of manipulation and ensuring that truth
and ethics guide any future actions."
It was a masterstroke. He painted himself as a victim stepping away from
a toxic situation, invoked the protection of a child, and subtly framed the
narrative around "manipulation" and "truth." He offered no confirmation of the rumours,
yet his resignation and grave demeanour confirmed everything. The empire wasn't
just cracking from external pressure; its heir was publicly and definitively
abandoning it.
By evening, the cracks became chasms. Two major European investment
partners suspended all dealings. A flagship charitable foundation bearing the
Cohen name announced a "pause for internal review." Most devastatingly, a bloc
of old-money board members, for whom social standing was the ultimate currency,
privately demanded Arthur's immediate resignation and a "completely new, and
unrelated, leadership."
The gilded world the Cohens had built, where secrets were currency and
appearance was everything, had turned on them. Their secret was too strange,
too visceral, too interesting to be contained. It wasn't about illegal profits
or hidden leverage; it was about the fundamental, squirming horror of corrupted
family bonds. High society, which could forgive financial piracy, could not
forgive becoming a laughingstock.
In the quiet of his rented safe house, Julian watched the coverage, a
glass of water untouched beside him. There was no victory in it, only a vast,
hollow landscape of ruin. His phone rang—a blocked number. He knew who it was.
He answered.
"You see what happens when you pry open graves?" Steven Cohen's voice
was on the line, no longer a ghost's whisper but vibrant with furious, vengeful
life. "You let the rot into the air. Now they all breathe it."
"You did this," Julian said, weary to his bones.
"I exposed it!" Steven snarled. "That woman… that creature he married…
she thought she could purify my bloodline. She thought she could steal my son
and then steal his future. Now the world sees her for what she is. And they see
him for the coward who let it happen."
"And the child?" Julian asked, the only thing that mattered.
A pause. When Steven spoke again, his voice was low, deadly. "My
grandchild. She will not be raised in that house of lies. That, I promise you."
The line went dead. The ghost had declared his next target. The empire
was crumbling. And at the centre of the wreckage, an unborn child waited, her
life already a battleground. The war had just escalated from the shadows of
boardrooms and clinics into the glaring, unforgiving light of total scandal.
The fall of the House of Cohen had begun, and no one would emerge unscathed.