Chapter 112 Who Actually Killed Him?

Chapter 112 Who Actually Killed Him?
For a second, everything Elias has built himself around cracks straight down the middle.
The years of anger. The reason he walked into this house under a false name in the first place, the mole work, the months of calculated proximity to a family he’d convinced himself deserved every ounce of what he was planning to do to them. All of it rests on a single foundation, one name attached to one death, and David has just knocked the entire structure sideways with four words.
“What, um…” Elias begins, because it’s the only thing his mouth can produce right now. “What?”
David sits down slowly across from him. “Take a seat, Elias.”
Elias sits, though his legs don’t fully cooperate with the request.
“Your father and I met at nineteen,” David begins. “We were randomly assigned roommates first year of university in Brown. I was there on my parents’ savings. He was there on a scholarship, worked two jobs on top of a full course load just to keep himself afloat. We became friends the way people become friends out of necessity when you’re that age and that broke, sharing everything, resenting nothing about it.” A faint, distant smile touches his mouth. “We used to sit up half the night arguing about what we wanted to be. Both of us convinced we were going to be something. We just didn’t know what yet.”
Elias stays quiet, wondering how this has anything to do with his father’s death, but trusting the process nonetheless.
“Our business idea started on a napkin,” David continues. “While we were sharing a burger one afternoon in a diner that doesn’t exist anymore. It was Adrian’s idea originally, though I contributed my share of it once he’d talked me into believing it could actually work. We built the entire concept together, the two of us, before either of us had a single cent to make it real.”
“So what happened?”
“Nobody wanted to fund two broke graduates with no track record,” David says. “No matter how good the idea was. I went to my family eventually, because I had a family with some money and he didn’t, and they agreed to provide the capital. On one condition… that the company carried the Reid name and my family kept majority control.”
“And Adrian just accepted that.”
“We didn’t have another option,” David answers. “It was that or nothing. So we accepted it, and Reid Global was born, and for a while it was exactly what we both wanted it to be.”
He pauses, his jaw tightening slightly.
“Then the competition started playing dirty,” he continues. “Sabotage. Threats against our early investors. A warehouse fire that wasn’t remotely an accident. Early success put us in rooms with people who didn’t operate by any rules either of us understood yet, and protecting what we’d built slowly became something considerably darker than either of us planned for when we sat in that diner.”
“That’s how you became a mobster,” Elias mutters, mostly to himself, as the pieces finally click together.
“That’s how we entered into the criminal world,” David corrects. “Together. I was colder about it, more calculated. Adrian was ambitious in a way that served us well, and for years, we worked perfectly in sync. I worked my way from underdog to Don, and with Adrian by my side, we were absolutely unstoppable. Then it started to shift.”
“How?”
“He wanted more,” David says. “More power, more control, faster decisions than the ones I was willing to make. He started overriding me. Making calls without consulting me first, putting the entire organization at risk more than once for gains that weren’t worth the exposure.” His voice goes quieter. “Eventually I had no choice but to demote him and promote someone else in his place.”
“Damn,” Eli exhales. “I’m guessing he didn’t like that very much.”
“Of course he didn’t. He punched the crap out of me when that happened.” He chuckles slightly, leaning back in his chair. “I would have too, in his position. I regretted the decision almost immediately, if I’m honest with you. But I believed it was necessary at the time.”
Elias’s hands have gone cold in his lap, waiting for the part he already knows is coming.
“There was an operation,” David says. “We needed someone undercover, investigating a rival organization that had been circling us for months. Adrian volunteered. I think, looking back, he saw it as a way to prove himself again, to earn back what the demotion had cost him.” He stops, something crossing his face that Elias hasn’t seen there before, something close to grief. “Unfortunately, something went wrong along the way. I sent men in to extract him the second we lost contact, but it wasn’t clean. During the extraction, there was exchange of fire and he was shot. Multiple times. He died at the scene before anyone could get him out.”
The room goes very quiet.
“I spent years blaming myself for sending him,” David sighs. “For the promotion I gave Marcus instead of him. For every decision that put him in that building in the first place. I still do, some days.”
Elias sits with it, turning the entire story over, feeling something enormous and disorienting settle into the space where his hatred used to live. He spent his whole life aimed at this man. Every year of it. His mother’s silence, her grief, the specific rage that raised him, all of it built on a name that was never actually attached to the crime.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” he asks finally. “Why did you let me and my mother, believe you were the one who killed him. For over a decade.”
“Because I didn’t know,” David responds. “I tried to approach Emilia at the funeral. I wanted to explain everything and to make sure she knew you and her would be taken care of. But before I could say a word, she screamed at me in front of half the mourners, told me to get out and that she never wanted to see my face near her family again. I assumed she blamed me for sending him on the mission in the first place, which was fair, honestly, and I respected the boundary. So I didn’t push it.” He pauses. “It wasn’t until Selene told me a few weeks ago that I understood that you and your mother believed I’d pulled the trigger myself. I had no idea either of you carried that particular version of the story for over a decade.”
Elias doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He sits there absorbing the full weight of it, every year of orchestrated grief reshaping itself in his mind, every conversation with his mother, every silent, furious anniversary at that kitchen table, all of it built on a story that was never true.
After a long stretch of silence, he finally asks the question that matters more than any of the others.
“Who killed him?” he asks. “Who actually killed my father?”
David’s answer comes without a single second of hesitation.
“Carver Mayfield.”