Chapter 31 Co-heirs
My eyes traced the words until they blurred together and until it felt like the ink was bleeding straight up into my chest. I continued reading:
'I met his mother only once. Her name was Isabelle, and she was broken in ways I couldn’t fix.'
I picture my mother as she must have been back then—younger, still hopeful and probably still believing she could shield people from my father if she tried hard enough.
I could feel Jack's presence around me but then I imagined Isabelle through my mother's eyes; she was a woman worn thin by secrets and fear, by loving the wrong man and by paying for it quietly. But I continued reading:
'She begged me not to let Conrad destroy her boy.'
My throat tightened.
"Elena..." Jack called but I didn't respond, my eyes were fixated on my mother's letter.
Isabelle begged my father? She resolved to begging—a mother who had already lost too much. I continued reading:
'So I helped her. I helped her leave.'
A sharp breath escaped me, half sob, half disbelief. My mother had always been painted as gentle, passive, and fragile. But this side of her was defiance. She had moved a piece on Conrad’s board without his permission and lived with the consequences in silence. My eyes peered down again to continue:
'If Mark ever finds his way back into your life, be careful. He may carry Conrad’s blood, but he does not carry his loyalty. Not to power or to cruelty.'
My fingers clenched around the page. God... I wanted to believe that part,I wanted to cling to it like a life raft. Then the final part:
'Maybe, just maybe, he’ll remind you of the part of your father that still had a soul.'
That was where my body gave out. I didn’t feel hope or redemption or even clarity. I felt my knees weaken, my breath hitch painfully in my chest, and my strength evaporate all at once.
I sank back into my chair, the leather was cold against my skin, the letter trembled violently in my hand like it was alive.
My heart was racing and breaking deliberately.
“Elena?” Jack’s voice cut through the fog, more closer now. I hadn’t even realized he’d moved until he was crouched beside me, his hand hovering near my knee, unsure whether to touch me or not.
But I still couldn’t answer, I just held the letter out to him, my fingers were numb.
He took it carefully from me, like he understood this wasn’t just paper. Then he read in silence.
I watched his face change—confusion giving way to something darker. A dawning understanding that settled into his eyes like a storm cloud.
When he looked at me, his voice was steady, but his gaze searched mine. “Do you believe it?”
“Yes.” The word came out hoarse, scraped raw from my throat. There wasn’t even a flicker of doubt. “I do.”
“Do you want to confront him?” he asked gently.
I shook my head immediately. “No, not yet.”
How could I? When I barely knew how to sit with it, let alone weaponize it. My thoughts were colliding, overlapping, and refusing to line up into anything coherent.
Mark is my half-brother.
The man who had smiled at me like he knew something I didn’t, the very man who had stepped into Vale Corp with the type of confidence that now felt less like ambition and more like inheritance.
He hadn’t clawed his way back in but he’d walked like someone returning home.
And my father had never said a word about it to warn or even to prepare me. Not even to acknowledge the existence of another child of his.
My hands curled into fists, my nails biting into my palms. “I should have known,” I whispered.
Jack shook his head. “There was no way you could have.”
But I didn’t answer him because my mother’s voice had risen again, clear and insistent, threading itself through my thoughts just like it had in my dreams.
'You must never forget who your father is.'
Now I understood.
She hadn’t been talking about caution, she had been talking about survival.
I didn’t go to Mark.
Not that day, not even the next. Not even when every instinct in my body screamed to march into his office, look him in the eye, and demand answers I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear.
The letter from my mother sat folded in my bag like a shard of glass lodged beneath my ribs—sharp, unmoving, and impossible to ignore.
So instead of confronting him, I did what I’d learned to do long before I learned how to trust anyone. I hunted.
Jack didn’t question it when I told him where we were going. So we went down past the executive floors with their polished glass and curated confidence and down into the underbelly of Vale Corp, where the lights flickered like they were tired of illuminating secrets and the air smelled faintly of dust, metal, and something colder—old decisions that had never been forgiven. The archives.
They weren’t meant to be visited anymore because everything important was supposed to be digital, streamlined, and traceable. But Conrad had never trusted systems he couldn’t touch because he believed in paper trails buried so deep no one would think to dig.
But It took Jack and I everything to get in.
When the door finally opened, the chill that washed over me didn’t feel mechanical but haunted.
“What are we even looking for?” Jack asked quietly, his voice instinctively lowered, as if the walls themselves were listening. He stood near one of the old index terminals, scrolling through a directory last modified before I’d officially joined the company.
My fingers moved almost on their own, sliding along file tabs, skimming blinking logs, which was all thanks to the years of being raised by Conrad who had trained me to recognize what didn’t quite fit.
And then I saw it, the Project Ardent.
The name meant nothing at first. Just another inert listing buried among hundreds of defunct initiatives but something about it made me stop. I opened the metadata before I did the same with the cross-references.
My pulse slowed. “Here,” I said quietly. “This name—it keeps appearing not quite in the obvious places but in budgets that don’t line up and also in travel invoices routed through internal board funding.”
Jack moved closer, leaning over my shoulder. I could feel his tension shift and sharpen. “That's definitely not random,” he said after a moment. “ Project Ardent was one of Conrad’s preferred code names. He used aliases like this for personal initiatives in the past. They were projects he didn’t want traced back to him directly.”
A cold weight settled in my stomach.
And then we opened the linked files. They were vague by design. Carefully worded memos that said just enough to justify the expenses without explaining it. Monthly stipends issued to a strategic development candidate abroad. Long-term housing allowances filtered through shell foundations. Educational sponsorships in Europe—elite institutions, private tutors, discreet security—funded under a philanthropic entity that didn’t officially exist.
The dates made my chest tighten.
Twenty years.
Twenty freaking years and the recipient wasn’t even named anywhere. There was no photograph or biography. Just an ID number, an ID number I already knew belonged to Mark.
The room felt smaller all at once, like the walls had crept closer while I wasn’t looking.
“He’s been groomed for twenty whole years,” I murmured, the words leaving my mouth before I could soften them. “Mark had been planted and paid for all this time.”
I didn’t quite feel angry, but I felt hollow.
Jack’s jaw flexed, his hand curling into a fist at his side. “And no one knew?”
I shook my head slowly. “Someone had to have known about this,” I said. “Conrad couldn’t have pulled this off alone, not for decades and especially not without someone on the board keeping the doors open, the signing off, and the pretense.”
The realization was worse than discovering Mark existed. It meant this wasn’t just a secret but a conspiracy.
Jack turned to me. “So, do we tell him you know?"
I thought of the shareholders’ meeting looming on the calendar, of how quickly power could shift when uncertainty crept in.
Mark and I are now co-heirs. I let that knowledge sink in.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Jack studied my face. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know what he wants,” I replied honestly. “And until I do, confronting him would only give him leverage.”
I straightened, forcing my shoulders back, my spine into alignment. This was the posture my father had taught me. The one that said I am not afraid, even when fear was threading through my every thought.
“If Mark is here because Conrad sent him,” I continued, “then this is about control, about succession and legacy.”
“And if he’s not?” Jack asked.
I met his eyes. “Then this is about revenge or truth, or something far more dangerous.”
Silence settled between us again, heavy but purposeful.