Chapter 36 Change and Control (Aalam)
After the meeting, the mask slipped back on.
Aalam and Cadeyrn left the war room and returned to their familiar domains different worlds governed by the same law: appearance over reality.
Aalam switched immediately into king-mode.
By 7:00 PM, he was back in his office, hunched over contract disputes, legal briefings, and hush agreements trying to contain the latest scandals from the cousins, mistresses, and quietly failing branch companies. One family member got caught threatening a journalist. Another was sued by her personal chef. And the youngest heiress? Trending on social media for throwing a matcha latte at a museum curator.
Aalam didn’t flinch.
He lined up calls with attorneys, publicists, and two foreign investors all while pacing beneath his marble ceiling, silk tie loosened but never undone.
By the time he left the office and stepped into his penthouse, it was 8:37 p.m.
The house was dark.
On the kitchen counter sat a white box and a handwritten card. Inside: a single-tier cake with muted icing and a message in elegant cursive
“Happy Birthday, My Brilliant Boy.
—Grandma. 🎂❤️”
That’s how he remembered.
It was his birthday.
Aalam stared at the cake, unmoving.
He hadn’t received a single call. No texts. No messages from his siblings. Not even a courtesy ping from his parents or the Board. Not one person in the empire he protected remembered the day he was born.
The only one who ever did was his grandmother.
She was the last thread of warmth left in a family that had long forgotten how to love.
Every year, without fail, she sent something sometimes a letter, sometimes a call, sometimes just a card that smelled faintly of rose water and lavender. She still called him once a week, her voice soft, unwavering, asking about his health, reminding him to eat, to rest, to breathe.
And though her words steadied him for a moment, nothing could replace losing a mother.
That loss never aged; it just changed shape.
He hadn’t cried in decades. Instead, he calmly took off his watch, set it next to the untouched cake, and poured himself a glass of scotch. Alone. As always.
That night, the silence pressed against him like a living thing. His chest tightened—the familiar, creeping pressure he’d come to dread. The panic always came on this night, every year since his tenth birthday.
The memory was burned into him like a scar that never healed.
He had come home from school, still wearing his backpack, excited to show his mother the birthday card he’d made.
The house had been too quiet. The smell of her perfume lingered in the air, mixed with something metallic.
He’d walked into the living room and there she was.
Lying still.
Eyes open, unseeing.
The cake half-frosted on the counter, just like the one tonight.
His small hands had shaken her shoulders. He’d screamed until his throat tore. That sound—the raw, broken sound of a child calling for someone who would never answer—still lived somewhere deep inside him, locked away behind layers of composure and control.
The years didn’t dull it; they only buried it beneath success.
Now, as the panic seized him again, his breath stuttered. The air felt heavy, poisoned. His vision blurred at the edges. He stumbled to the bathroom, stripped off his shirt, and twisted the shower handle to full cold.
The water hit him like ice.
He gasped, chest heaving, countingone, two, three forcing breath back into his lungs. The shock numbed the trembling, but couldn’t quiet the ache. He pressed both palms against the tile, head bowed, water streaming over his face as he fought to come back to himself.
Minutes passed before his pulse began to slow.
He looked up, meeting his own reflection eyes bloodshot, jaw tight, haunted.
“You made it another year,” he whispered.
After his mother’s death, everything changed. Living with his father’s family had been more punishment than refuge. His stepmother’s smile never reached her eyes; her words cut quietly but deep. His father’s resentment hung like smoke resentment that Aalam existed when the woman he loved did not.
They were stricter with him than anyone else. Every consequence hit harder, every failure magnified. He was never allowed simply to perform, to lead, to correct. Especially for Niko, his reckless younger brother. Since high school, Aalam had taken detentions for him, scrubbed his social media disasters, and cleaned up his chaos before it reached the tabloids.
His grandfather had noticed early the discipline, the composure, the problem-solving instinct. He took Aalam under his wing, molding him into the family’s shield and strategist.
But control had become his only form of peace.
And now, standing alone in the cold glow of his penthouse, city lights flickering through glass, Aalam understood the cruel symmetry of his life:
Every empire he built was a monument to the silence of that living room.
Every success, a negotiation with grief.
And no amount of power would ever silence the echo of a boy calling out for his mother.