Chapter 111 He Isn't There

Chapter 111 He Isn't There
Lucia and Nora are already crossing the entrance hall before the men have fully cleared the doorway, both of them moving with the frantic energy of people who spent the last hour imagining every possible worst outcome.
“The comms went dead,” Nora says, reaching David first, her both hands going to check him. “We lost contact for almost twenty minutes, I thought–”
“We’re fine,” David says, catching her hands to steady her. “Just a glitch in the equipment. Nothing more than that.”
“You’re bleeding through your shirt.”
“It’s a scratch.”
“Upstairs,” Nora says, already pulling him toward the staircase, her voice leaving no room for argument. “Now. I want to see it properly before you tell me again that it’s nothing.”
David glances back once, finding Elias near the door, something unreadable passing across his face before Nora tugs him around the corner and out of sight.
The moment they’re gone, Lucia’s arms are around Elias’s neck, her whole body pressed against his, and he feels her shaking slightly even through the layers between them.
“I’m fine, baby,” he murmurs into her hair.
“I was so scared,” she says, muffled against his shoulder. “I genuinely think I almost had a panic attack, Eli, twenty minutes of dead silence on the comms and I had absolutely no idea whether you were–”
“I’m fine,” he repeats, letting one arm come around her automatically.
She doesn’t let go. If anything her grip tightens, her fingers curling into the back of his jacket.
“I know what you’re saying,” she says, “but my brain apparently didn’t get the memo, because it’s still trying very hard to convince itself that you’re actually standing here and not lying somewhere I can’t reach you.”
He holds her through it, letting her fuss over him for longer than strictly necessary, her hands moving to check his knuckles again, his shoulder, the side of his jaw where a bruise is already starting to bloom from the earlier fight, and something in his chest warms at the intensity of her worry.
But underneath the warmth, he wonders briefly whether this is about him specifically or whether it’s simply the residual terror of a girl who’s already watched one person she cared about die in front of her and can’t currently separate that grief from every subsequent worry she has about anyone else in her orbit.
He doesn’t ask her. He doesn’t think either of them would benefit from the answer right now.
“I need to go,” he says eventually, gently extracting himself from her grip. “David asked me to meet him in his study.”
Her brow furrows immediately. “Why?”
“Guess I’m about to find out.”
She watches him go with an expression he can’t fully read, something between worry and curiosity, and he leaves her standing in the hallway, making his way toward the study with a low, persistent unease building in his chest that he can’t quite place.
David’s already inside when Elias arrives, the door left slightly ajar, and he steps in to find David crouched behind his own desk, working at something Elias can’t immediately see.
“Close the door,” David says, without looking up.
Elias does.
David presses something along the inside edge of the desk, and a panel Elias never noticed swings open silently. Inside sits a small safe, and from it David retrieves a laptop clearly built to run entirely off the house’s network.
“This is the backup,” David says, setting it on the desk and opening it. “Of the hard drive you helped them take from this house the night of Lucia’s birthday.”
Elias’s pulse picks up. “You said there was something I needed to know about my father.”
“There is,” David confirms. “You’ll find it faster this way than any other way I could explain it.”
He turns the laptop toward Elias and steps back.
What opens in front of Elias isn’t a single file. It’s a database, vast and meticulously organized, spanning what looks like two full decades of entries, and for the next hour he sits at David’s desk and reads through a version of the man’s life he never had access to before, never even knew existed in this kind of detail.
Names he half recognizes from old news stories that were never fully explained to the public. Debts collected through methods that turn his stomach the longer he reads. A long column of men David either ordered killed or allowed to be killed, documented with the same procedural efficiency David brings to closing a business deal.
Elias reads it with his jaw locked tight, feeling something in his chest tighten with every entry, every name attached to a date and a reason spelled out in language too clinical to properly capture whatever violence actually happened behind it.
Then he notices the second list.
It’s longer than the first, containing dozens of families quietly supported in the aftermath of exactly the deaths logged above them, fathers and brothers and sons removed from the world David used to move through, and beneath each name a trail of anonymous support routed through three separate shell accounts specifically so it could never be traced back to the man responsible for the loss that made it necessary in the first place.
School fees. Medical bills. Rent covered for years at a time, sometimes decades, sometimes still ongoing according to the most recent entries.
“Why did you do this,” Elias asks, looking up.
“Children don’t pay for their parents’ sins,” David replies simply.
Elias sits with that for a long moment, letting the words settle within him, and then almost without meaning to, he goes back to the first list, scrolls up, and begins searching.
He reads every name twice, slower the second time, certain he must have missed it, certain his own eyes are somehow failing him. But no matter how much he looks, it’s still the same result.
Adrian Arden isn’t there.
He scrolls further, checking dates, checking every possible variation of the name, checking entries from years he knows for certain overlap with his father’s death, and finds nothing. No entry. No reason. No record at all of the one death that has shaped every single decision Elias has made for the last several years of his life.
“Where,” he asks, looking up. His voice cracks a little, so he clears his throat and tries again. “Where is Adrian?”
David meets his eyes without flinching, without a trace of the discomfort Elias half expects and half needs to see.
“He isn’t there,” David replies.
Eli frowns, looking at David with clear confusion on his face. David takes his time as he bends over to close the laptop, before speaking again.
“Because I never killed your father.”