Chapter 121 I Mourned Him

Chapter 121 I Mourned Him
Elias leaves Lucia and Selene to secure the ledger and heads back to Crane Street, his mind still turning over everything from the last twenty four hours in a loop that won’t quiet down no matter how hard he tries to focus on the road ahead of him.
He steps through the front door of his childhood home, finding his mother sitting at the small kitchen table, sipping tea from a ceramic mug. The sudden surge of color in her face, funded by the secret hand of a dead man, makes Eli’s stomach knot.
He sits down across from her without pulling off his jacket and stares at her for a long moment, watching the way the sunlight catches the graying strands near her temples.
“Mom,” Eli begins carefully. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me directly.”
“Ok. Sure.” Emilia sets her mug down, brow furrowing slightly at his intensity. “What is it?”
For the first time in his life, he asks the question he’s never once dared to say out loud, not even in his own head with any real seriousness, because asking it always felt like a betrayal of the grief that raised him.
“Did you actually see David kill Dad.”
His mother blinks, caught completely off guard. “Where on earth is this coming from?”
“Just answer me honestly please,” Eli insists, leaning forward. “Did you physically see David give that order, or see him pull a trigger?”
“No,” Emilia says, her voice defensive now. “Of course I didn’t see it happen. I received the news from someone who was standing right there.”
Eli pauses, looking intently at his mother. “Who?”
“Carver,” she replies without hesitation. “He was there when David authorized his team to eliminate your father at the docks.”
Elias goes quiet for a long moment. “And you just believed him.”
“I had no reason not to,” his mother says, her chin tilting up. “Your father had been telling me for months that he suspected David was trying to get rid of him. And then that mission happened, Adrian never came home, and Carver came to my door to tell me why. It proved everything your father warned me about.”
“And you never once tried to verify it?” Elias asks, his voice hardening. “You never questioned a man you’d just met, telling you the person your husband worked with for over a decade had him executed.”
Emilia pauses, clearly confused by his hostility, before her eyes narrow. “Why are you even asking all these questions right now? David got to you, didn’t he? He’s manipulating you to–”
“You trained me my entire life to hate a man based solely on the word of mouth of a person you just fucking met!” Eli interrupts, his voice rising and breaking through the quiet kitchen.
“Watch your language in this house, Elias!” Emilia snaps back, her cheeks flushing red. “There was no verification needed. Your father knew David was out for him, and someone literally saw David give the order. He killed my Adrian. It is as simple as that.”
Eli doesn’t argue further with words. He reaches into his jacket, pulling out a thick manila folder of certified public records he smuggled out of the county office earlier that week, and slams it onto the kitchen table between them.
The heavy thud vibrates through the wood. Emilia flinches, staring down at the papers.
“Read it,” Eli says, his voice dropping into a low, harsh register.
She stares at it for a moment before opening it, and he watches her go through the property records slowly. The mortgage restructured, the debt quietly absorbed, the timeline lining up too precisely to be coincidence. She sees the signature at the bottom of the loan payoff documents from eight years ago… not her own, not a bank relief program, but a corporate entity controlled entirely by David Reid.
Eli watches something in her face fracture as she reassembles twenty-two years of quietly not going hungry that she had always credited to her own stubbornness. She sits there, reading the exact financial chain and realizing that David Reid – the man she had raised her son to hate with total, unyielding conviction – was underneath all of it the whole time, keeping the roof over her head while letting her believe she was standing on her own.
“This is bullshit,” she whispers, though her voice lacks conviction now. Her eyes dart frantically across the lines of text. “He must have bough the...,” A pause as she swallows. “He must have bought the debts and the, uh… the mortgage to hold it over us.”
“Mom–”
“He bought you,” she insists. “The same way he bought this roof over our heads. You’ve let that man buy your loyalty.”
She throws the folder back down, accusing Eli of turning his back on his own blood.
Eli fights the old instinct to match her anger with his own shouting. He doesn’t retaliate. He sits back down in the chair, pulls it closer to hers and lets her be furious, frightened and utterly betrayed by her own curated memory of the man she married.
He waits until her breathing slows and the defensive rage drains out of her before he decides to speak.
“Mom,” Eli says gently, reaching across the table to cover her hand. “Adrian is alive.”
She stares at him.
“David didn’t kill him,” Elias continues. “He survived the extraction. He’s been alive this whole time, watching us from a distance.”
“T-that’s,” she stammers, pulling her hand back slightly. “No, that’s impossible. We buried–”
“He swapped your prescriptions three weeks ago,” Eli cuts in, laying out the brutal reality piece by piece. “The medical treatment you’re on, the sudden burst of energy you felt yesterday, it came from him. He has been in the city for months… maybe years.” A pause as Eli looks her in the eyes to make sure she understands what he’s saying. “I saw him myself.”
Emilia’s reaction progresses through sheer disbelief, to stunned shock, and then into a dark, terrifying fury that burns hotter than anything she directed at David.
“He let me bury an empty grave,” she whispers, her voice breaking apart on the words.
“I’m sorry Mom,” Eli says quietly.
She’s quiet for a while before she asks. “W-why now?”
Eli shifts uncomfortably. “He wants me to help him destroy David.”
Eli goes silent, his chest feeling heavy as the terrifying weight of his position presses down on him.
After a long while of silence, Emilia reaches across the wooden table, wrapping her small, thin hands tightly around Eli’s wrists, and forcing him to look directly into her eyes.
“Adrian left,” Emilia says, her voice ringing with absolute, fierce clarity. “David didn’t. David helped us. Whatever David’s past sins are, whatever blood he has on his hands, he did not abandon you and he did not abandon me.”
Eli looks down at her hands and then back up at her.
“Your father died to me ten years ago, Elias.” Her grip on his hand tightens. “I grieved him. I raised you without him. I learned how to live my entire life without him in it, and I did that grieving properly, completely, the way you’re only supposed to have to do it once.”
“What am I supposed to do,” Elias asks, “if he comes after us. After you.”
“You do what you have to do,” she says, steady now, certain in a way he hasn’t heard from her in years. “I mourned that man already. I’m not doing it again just because he’s decided to reappear.”
The words settle into Eli’s chest, giving him the precise emotional anchor he needs to survive what comes next. He leans forward, kissing his mother’s forehead, promises to check in later, before standing up and walking out into the bright afternoon sun.
His phone rings before he’s made it two blocks.
The screen displays an unknown, unlisted number and he knows who it is even without the caller ID.
Adrian.
He stares at the screen for a second, then clicks answer without speaking first.
“Did you find it?” Adrian’s voice comes through the speaker, cold, direct, and stripped of all paternal warmth.
Eli’s hands tighten around the phone, his posture locking up, his eyes staring straight down the empty suburban street. His mind is a mess of competing thoughts… his mother’s face, the ledger sitting in Lucia’s hands right now, the impossible weight of choosing a version of loyalty that doesn’t destroy something else in the process.
“Yes,” Eli says finally.
A long, heavy silence stretches over the line. Adrian doesn’t celebrate. He simply breathes into the microphone, waiting.
“And?” Adrian asks softly.
Eli closes his eyes for a fraction of a second, weighing all the years of craving a father figure in his life, against loyalty to a man who took care of him, but can never actually be his father.
He exhales, making his final calculation, and opens his eyes.
“I can get it to you.”