Chapter 113 Mirror

Chapter 113 Mirror
Elias spends the following afternoon at the county records office, the same cramped, fluorescent lit room he sat in months ago tracking down dead men’s identities, working through a stack of paperwork with the same clerk contact who owes Alvin enough favors to keep asking no questions.
He’s here for something simpler this time. Or what should be simpler.
The house he grew up in. The one his mother’s still living in, the one he’s spent his entire life believing his father left them free and clear as the one small stubborn piece of security in an otherwise unstable childhood.
As it turns out, it isn’t free and clear.
The records show two separate loans taken out against the property in the two years before Adrian’s death, both substantial, both structured in a way that any reasonable lender would have called in well before now. By every normal calculation, the bank should have seized that house within eighteen months of Adrian disappearing from the world.
But that obviously didn’t happen.
Elias flips through the pages slower now, tracing the trail, and finds the debt was quietly purchased less than a year after his father’s death, structured into small monthly payments low enough that a struggling widow raising a child alone could have absorbed them without ever noticing the original terms had changed at all.
He already knows who did it before he finds it printed on the transfer paperwork.
He leans back in the plastic chair, holding the file heavy in his lap, and sits with the vertigo of a question he isn’t sure he’s ready to answer. If David bought out the debt on a house belonging to a man he supposedly murdered. If David’s been quietly keeping a roof over the head of the family he supposedly destroyed for over a decade…
Could it actually be true that  the man he’s spent his entire life hating, hunting, orchestrating an infiltration against, actually be innocent of the one thing that mattered most.
His phone buzzes, cutting into his thoughts. He glances down and sees a text from Lucia.
《Where are you?》
He texts back, 《Got caught up in a little something. I’ll be there soon.》 Then folds the file and tucks it into his jacket, and heads for the mansion with his mind still turning the whole thing over.
David’s stepping out the front door just as Elias reaches it, and they pass each other with a brief nod, nothing more, David’s expression giving away nothing about the conversation from the night before.
Elias steps in and finds Lucia in the sitting room, and she looks up the second he walks in.
She stands up and moves to him. “What did my father want you for?”
“We, um... had a little talk last night.”
“I figured that part out, genius. I mean, what about? My Dad only ever summons people to his office for important business or murder. Which was it?”
He tells her everything about his conversation with David last night  The database… the two lists… Adrian’s name missing from the death column. Carver’s name where David’s should have been. He watches her expression shift through disbelief, horror, and something that looks almost like grief on his behalf by the time he finishes.
“Holy fuck,” she mutters. “You’re serious?”
“I wish I wasn’t.”
They sit with it together, piecing the timeline apart, and somewhere in the middle of it Elias’s mind drifts toward what David showed him last night, particularly the list of quietly supported families, school fees and medical bills routed through shell accounts specifically so gratitude could never trace back to the source.
“My scholarship,” he says slowly. “To Fairfield. A woman named Selene showed up out of nowhere offering me a full ride to a school I’d never applied to, right after I got expelled. I knew it was too convenient even then. I just didn’t have anywhere to point the suspicion.”
Lucia’s eyes go wide. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Selene… as in Aunt Sel?”
Eli frowns. “Who is Aunt Sel?”
“My aunt. Could it be…” Lucia fades out, her eyes lost in thought.  “I just recalled that a few months ago, when I broke into Mercer’s office looking for your address, I saw your student file. There was a section, the scholarship section, and part of it was redacted. I noticed it at the time, thought it was strange, but I didn’t think much of it beyond that.”
They look at each other.
“Do you really think…” Eli begins.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“That is not a good idea,” Elias says immediately, shaking his head.
She rolls her eyes. “Calm your tits. I’m not talking about sneaking into my father’s study.”
He raises a skeptical brow.
“I want us to ask my Mom,” she completes.
“That’s considerably more reasonable.”
“I keep telling everyone impulsive Lucia doesn’t exist anymore. Now we do things by the book.” She stands, already heading for the door, and glances back at him. “You coming?”
Eli begins to stand, then hesitates and settles back on the chair. “You should go ahead without me.”
Lucia rolls her eyes again. “My mom doesn’t hate you.”
“She hasn’t said two words to me since I got into this house.”
“That’s not true. She welcomed you when you arrived.”
“That was months ago, and it was three words, and none of them were warm.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“I’m being accurate.”
They go back and forth like that the whole way to the kitchen, Lucia eventually winning through sheer persistence, and they find Nora at the counter, sorting through mail with the kind of focused efficiency she brings to everything.
“Mom,” Lucia says. “Can we ask you something?”
Nora glances up. “Of course.”
“Um, Eli and I have been talking and we kinda want to know…  just how far does Dad’s influence actually reach into Eli’s life. Be honest.”
Nora sets the mail down slowly. “David finally told you, huh?” They both nod, and she continues, “Everything you could possibly think of. Honestly.”
“How?” Elias asks.
“I know he paid for your house,” Nora informs him. “Not directly, obviously, that would have raised questions. But he restructured your father’s debt on it after his death, kept the payments low enough your mother could manage. He also funded your schooling and arranged the training job that got you into boxing in the first place.”
“Alvin approached me with that job,” Elias says, frowning.
“Alvin approached you because David paid a broker to find him,” Nora says. “David noticed you as a child, watched a boy carrying an enormous amount of rage with nowhere useful to put it, and understood exactly where that kind of anger leads a kid growing up in your neighborhood if nobody intervenes. So he found you an outlet. A ring, discipline, somewhere to channel all that anger that wasn’t the streets.”
Elias remembers it now, exactly, Alvin approaching him at thirteen with an offer that felt like a lifeline at the time, no context for why a stranger would take that kind of interest in him. Boxing was the only way he could take care of himself and his mother. They might have starved without it.
“I, uh…” Eli mutters, mostly to himself, “never knew any of this.”
“You might have,” Nora says, something sharpening in her voice now, “if you’d simply asked instead of assuming we were the ones responsible for your father’s death and building an entire operation around destroying us for it.”
“Mom, that’s not fair,” Lucia interjects.
“I never meant for anyone to actually get hurt,” Elias says quickly. “I just thought–”
“You pointed a gun at my family,” Nora cuts in, her voice rising, “and I don’t give a single damn whether you meant to shoot it, because it went off. We are in this situation, all of us, my daughter grieving a man who died protecting her, all because of what you started.”
She takes a step closer, and Elias holds his ground, though everything in him wants to look away from the fury currently aimed directly at him.
“You’d better thank your stars,” she tells him, “that my husband, for some inexplicable reason, believes he owes your father a debt. Because if it were left to me, I promise you, you would not have seen the light of day after what you did to this family.”
With that, she turns and walks out, leaving the kitchen ringing in her wake.
“I’m so sorry, Eli,” Lucia says quickly, turning to him. “She shouldn’t have said that, I don’t know what–”
“She’s not wrong, though.”
Lucia shakes her head. “She still shouldn’t have spoken–”
“I started all of it,” he insists quietly. “Which means I’m the one who needs to be the one to end it.”
She shakes her head immediately, harder. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I’m not gonna–”
“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid,” she says, her voice cracking slightly. “I don’t think I could survive losing you too. Not after everything.”
The look of actual panic in her face warms something in him. He steps closer to her, softening his voice as he says, “You won’t lose me.”
“Promise you won’t put yourself in harm’s way.”
He reaches out, gently brushing a strand of hair away from her face, letting his hand linger gently against her cheek.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he says softly. “But I can’t make you that promise. Because when it comes to you, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw myself in front of a freaking train if it meant keeping you safe.”
She leans into his hand, her eyes falling closed for a second. “I’m really going to need all of you to stop trying to protect me so damn much.”
He chuckles, leaning in to press a slow, gentle kiss to her forehead. “That’s literally my job, sweetheart.”
Just then, the kitchen door bursts open. They both turn and see Marcus standing in the doorway, breathing slightly hard as his eyes scan the room. “Where’s Nora?”
Lucia and Elias step apart quickly.
“She went upstairs,” Lucia tells him. “What’s wrong?”
“You know how we’ve been trying to figure out who's been leaking information this whole time?” Marcus says.
Lucia nods slowly.
“Well it turns out it might not be someone from this house after all,” he says. “We found something on your phone.”
He looks directly at her.
“Someone’s been mirroring it.”