Tessa slid the final file forward, the paper whispering across polished wood like a knife drawing breath before the strike.
Maxwell stared at it, his fingers hovering, refusing to touch what might destroy him.
“I didn’t want you to see it like this,” Maribel whispered, her voice thick with decades of love and disappointment layered into one trembling breath.
Maxwell finally opened the file, and the signatures inside stared back at him — his own name, forged in ink that mocked everything he believed was secure.
Why would Cassian do this?” he croaked, his voice breaking, each word tasting like betrayal he never asked to swallow.
Tessa’s eyes were gentle, but unflinching. “Because he never loved you the way you loved him. Loyalty is a currency, Mr. Grayson — and he sold his.”
Maxwell felt the walls tilt, as if his entire legacy were printed on paper just to burn.
Years of late-night negotiations, celebrations, shared whiskey after winning battles — all of it collapsed into ash the moment he understood.Cassian had been draining him like a slow leak — small enough not to notice, deadly enough to drown a kingdom.
And Maxwell finally whispered the truth aloud — a truth that tasted like rot.
“He wanted my life long before I realized he hated watching me live it.”
Maribel lowered her gaze, gripping her cane like a lifeline. “I caught him once… standing in your room when you were a boy. Looking at everything you had that he never would.”
The sentence struck Maxwell harder than any number on the balance sheet.
He remembered Cassian as a child — bruised, hungry, abandoned at the steps of the estate — the day Maxwell begged his mother to let him stay.
He was family by invitation.
He was ruin by choice.
Maxwell staggered backward, breathing like a man learning to inhale after nearly drowning.
“Where is he now?” he asked, voice sharp, suddenly made of steel.
Tessa exchanged a glance with Maribel — a silent language built through secrets Maxwell never knew were kept.
“He’s been in the city,” Maribel said quietly. “Meeting with investors. Whispering about a new company. One built on the bones of yours.”
Maxwell froze, rage and heartbreak swirling in him like a storm without sky.
His company — the empire built in his father’s name — was already being auctioned in shadows, like a carcass sold by wolves.
He slammed the file shut, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the room.
“No,” he whispered. “He doesn’t get to erase my father. He doesn’t get to rewrite my future.”
But it was Tessa who leaned forward, her voice cutting sharper than any blade.
“Then you must see the next folder.”
A second file — smaller, thinner — marked only with a single phrase:
To Be Opened When You Are Ready.
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