Chapter 118 Your Father

Chapter 118 Your Father
The static in my earpiece cuts out entirely, leaving a complete dead silence in my bedroom. The mic link on Eli’s end went dark the second he walked out of range, but every single word spoken in that warehouse is still echoing through my skull like a siren.
You’re my son, Elias. I need you to choose your family.
I stand up, smoothing down the front of my silk robe, though my hands are trembling so hard I can barely knot the sash around my waist. The front door of the main house clicks open downstairs, followed by quiet footsteps on the stairs.
I pull my bedroom door open before he even reaches the landing.
Eli stops in the doorway. He looks hollowed out. He doesn’t make a sarcastic remark. He doesn’t offer a half-hearted smile to deflect the weight hanging between us.
“I heard,” I say quietly, stepping back to let him into the room.
He steps inside, and I shut the door, locking it out of pure reflex. He sinks onto the edge of my bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and stares blankly at the rug between his boots.
“Ghost is my father,” he says quietly.
“I know,” I whisper, walking over to sit beside him.
“He has my mother on a medical trial,” Eli says, turning his head slowly to look at me. His dark eyes are completely fractured, spinning through a decade of lies. “He paid off European specialists to send experimental drugs to our doorstep and now–now she’s doing a lot better. He… says he’s trying to make it right.”
A cold, nauseating knot tightens in my stomach. The genius of Adrian’s play is terrifying.
“He’s manipulating you,” I say, . “He has been tracking your movements, watching you bleed yourself dry to pay her hospital bills, watching you fight on the streets to break even and now that you’ve taken a job in my father’s inner circle, he suddenly shows up with some miracle cure. It’s all a trick.”
“David says they were best friends. My Dad says David ordered the kill on him.” Eli rubs both hands over his face, letting out a long, shuddering breath. “I… don’t know what to think, honestly.”
“Do you believe him?” I ask, leaning in close so he has to look me in the eye. “Do you believe Ghost?”
“I believe he’s my father,” Eli replies quietly, the words heavy with a profound, unbearable sorrow. He pauses, his eyes searching mine. “I don’t know if I believe he’s telling me the truth.”
I reach out, taking his face in my hands, forcing him to stay anchored right here with me in this room. “Then we find out what actually happened ten years ago. We do not touch that ledger, and we do not hand anything over to a man who uses his own wife’s illness as a bargaining chip.”
“He wants the ledger as soon as possible ,” Eli says, though his hands come up to rest over mine, his thumbs brushing against my wrists. “If I don’t deliver it, he leaks every tape he has to the press and the federal prosecutors. He will destroy your family.”
“Not before I pull the truth out of my father,” I say, pulling back and standing up. “Come on.”
Eli looks up at me, brow furrowed. “Where are we going?”
“David’s study,” I say, my voice tight and unyielding. “We are going to ask the man who built this house what really happened on those docks ten years ago.”
As we move down the silent, dimly lit corridor of the east wing, I can’t help but wonder exactly how we’re going to break the news to my father. David and Adrian were brothers in everything but blood for fifteen years. They built an empire together out of nothing. Watching my father suffer through the tape delivery tonight was agonizing enough, but opening the grave of his absolute worst regret might completely shatter him.
We reach the double doors of Dad’s private office. Before Eli can second-guess it, I raise my hand, knock twice, and push the door open.
Dad looks up as we walk in, his eyes look tired, with dark circles beneath them deeper than I have ever seen them.
Deciding there’s no gentle way to ask this, I cut straight to it.
“Did you try to kill Adrian?”
My father doesn’t answer immediately. The silence stretches long enough that I feel my stomach start to sink.
Slowly, Dad leans back in his chair, setting the unlit cigar down on an antique crystal tray.
“Yes.”
I stumble back a half-step, staring at him in sheer disbelief. My father, the man who built an entire second life on a system of quiet, anonymous restitution for the families of men he’d hurt, would have authorized something like that against the person he apparently loved most in that world.
“He was becoming a monster,,” Dad continues. “In the final two years of our partnership, Adrian changed. He became increasingly dangerous, taking unapproved, independent actions that jeopardized our entire network. He began making aggressive moves against my authority, cutting side deals with cartels we specifically agreed to avoid, and bringing heat down on our logistics lines that nearly put all of us in prison.”
Eli takes a step forward from the door. “So you ordered a hit on him.”
When I sent him on that last mission, there were rumors circulating that he’d already turned, that he’d flipped to the opposing side entirely.” He pauses. “I told Marcus to prepare a contingency. If Adrian crossed a certain line, he was to be removed.”
“So you did order it,” Eli says quietly.
“I ordered a contingency,” Dad argues. “One I never wanted to use. Even after everything, even believing he’d flipped, I couldn’t go through with it when the moment actually came. I sent my own team in to extract him instead, planning to handle the betrayal a different way. Something short of a death sentence.” His jaw tightens. “But by the time they reached him, he’d already been discovered as a spy by the other side. A firefight broke out. The warehouse burned to the ground. My team pulled three bodies out of the rubble, but Adrian’s section of the floor collapsed into the structural bay. He died in the crossfire before we could reach him.”
Eli and I exchange a fast look across the desk. It lasts only a fraction of a second, but it is enough.
David leans forward, his eyes narrowing sharply as he scans my face, then shifts his gaze to Eli’s tense frame. “Is there something you both are not telling me?”
I take a small step back, giving Eli the room to say it himself.
Eli takes a deep breath, walking up until he is standing right beside my chair. He hesitates, his jaw working as he struggles to find the words.
“When I went home tonight,” Eli begins carefully, “my mother’s front door was left unlatched. There was a note left on my bed. A demand from Ghost.”
Dad sits up straight, his posture rigid. “What did the note say?”
“He told me to meet him back at the shipping docks by midnight, alone,” Eli says, looking David dead in the eye. “He threatened to leak the rest of your files if I brought a security detail. So I went.”
David’s eyes flare with sudden anger. “You went to an uncleared location alone after a tripwire blast? Are you insane?”
“I kept a live comm link open to Lucia,” Eli counters smoothly. “When I walked inside Warehouse 14, Ghost was already waiting for me.”
Eli hesitates. He parts his lips, his throat visibly locking up as he tries to force the final words out of his mouth.
“Ghost is… um…” Eli stammers, the air leaving his lungs in a ragged gasp. “He is…”
David looks at Eli’s pale face, then glances at me, reading the devastating truth written in our silence before the words even leave Eli’s lips.
The anger vanishes from David’s face, replaced by a cold, terrifying stillness.
“…your father,” he finishes for him, his eyes blown wide. “Adrian is alive.”