Chapter 7 - THE COUSIN WHO BORROWED MY THRONE
For one unbearable second, I believed Roman had taken Lily.
Then Hannah burst into Audrey’s room with Lily and Noah behind her.
Lily stared at the tablet. “That’s my favorite hoodie.”
Roman had stolen it from the safehouse to make me panic.
The tactic worked for almost three seconds.
Then rage sharpened into focus.
Gabriel ordered fire crews to the estate, but the access road was blocked by three overturned trucks. Roman had planned every delay.
He appeared on the security feed again, standing within the smoke.
“You chose strangers over blood,” he said into the camera. “This is what sentiment buys you.”
He tossed Lily’s hoodie into the fountain, then disappeared through the service passage beneath the conservatory.
The ledger remained in his hand.
The estate’s suppression system eventually contained the fire. Dozens of plants Audrey had cultivated were destroyed. The heron fountain cracked from the heat.
Roman had not burned the evidence because he needed it to bargain. The original ledger implicated powerful people—politicians, shipping executives, organized crime leaders, and several members of my board.
It also implicated Marino Logistics.
My signature appeared on customs exemptions Roman had placed in front of me years earlier.
I had believed they covered foundation shipments.
Ignorance would not absolve me.
That afternoon, Roman called an emergency meeting of the board and appeared by video from an undisclosed location. He announced that grief had rendered me mentally unstable and that criminals had manipulated me using a woman surgically altered to resemble Audrey.
He released edited footage of me threatening Crane in the conservatory, followed by images of armed men at Black Harbor.
News channels displayed headlines before the meeting ended:
HARBOR KING’S BREAKDOWN.
DEAD WIFE RETURNS IN BILLIONAIRE CONSPIRACY.
MARINO SUCCESSION CRISIS THREATENS THOUSANDS OF JOBS.
Roman understood that truth mattered less when he could flood the world with spectacle.
I joined the board meeting from the hospital.
My face appeared beside his across a wall of screens.
Roman smiled.
“Cousin, you should rest.”
“You tried to poison me.”
“That is the paranoia Dr. Crane warned us about.”
“Crane is alive and in federal custody.”
The smile tightened.
Roman’s attorneys moved to mute my connection. My chief counsel, Elena Vasquez, blocked them using a shareholder provision Audrey had written into the company bylaws twelve years earlier.
If the acting proxy faced credible allegations of violence against the principal shareholder, authority returned to the principal pending review.
Roman had forgotten the clause.
Audrey had not.
Dr. Park and an independent psychiatrist presented capacity certifications. DNA evidence confirmed Audrey’s identity. Federal agents verified the attacks at Black Harbor and the hospital.
One by one, directors stopped looking at Roman’s screen.
I revoked his proxy.
For the first time in eight years, voting control of Marino Logistics returned to me.
Roman’s face remained calm, but his right hand disappeared beneath the table.
Seconds later, every terminal operated by our company shut down.
Cranes froze above cargo ships. Rail switches locked. Payroll accounts vanished behind encrypted walls. Emergency systems failed at three fuel depots.
Roman had built a second company inside mine, and he had just taken it hostage.
“If you remove me,” he said, “the empire collapses.”
“Then it collapses.”
Several directors shouted.
Twenty-two terminals employed more than eighteen thousand people. A prolonged shutdown could cripple regional supply chains.
Roman leaned closer to his camera. “Reinstate my authority, publicly denounce Audrey, and send the Reed woman and her children out of the country. Everything returns to normal.”
Audrey entered the room in her wheelchair.
She still looked fragile, but her voice did not.
“You always mistake normal for safe, Roman.”
His expression changed when he saw her.
“You should have died in the river.”
The sentence left his mouth before his attorney could stop him.
The board fell silent.
The call was being recorded.
Roman recovered quickly. “I was speaking hypothetically.”
“No,” Audrey said. “You were finally speaking honestly.”
She held up the empty silver locket.
“You found the ledger. But you didn’t find the key.”
Roman’s eyes narrowed.
The paper ledger contained handwritten container codes. Without Audrey’s cipher, the numbers could be dismissed as internal references. The translation key was hidden inside the locket’s access chip.
Gabriel had extracted it that morning.
Audrey continued. “If anything happens to Caleb, me, Hannah, or either child, the decrypted records go to federal prosecutors and every major newspaper in the country.”
It was a bluff.
The decryption was only thirty percent complete.
Roman did not know that.
He ended the call.
Minutes later, three terminals came back online. He was buying time.
We needed the ledger before he learned the truth.
Crane regained consciousness that night. A federal prosecutor arranged a protected interview. Crane admitted falsifying Audrey’s death certificate, substituting my scans, and directing the drug regimen that suppressed my motor function.
He claimed Roman coerced him.
“Did he force you to accept twelve million dollars?” I asked.
Crane looked away.
He gave us the names of six medical facilities where Audrey had been confined. In exchange, prosecutors considered witness protection.
Audrey did not object.
I did.
“He stole eight years from us.”
“And if his testimony puts Roman away?” she asked.
“He belongs in prison beside him.”
“He probably will be. But I want the machine exposed more than I want one man punished as severely as possible.”
Her restraint humbled me.
I had spent my life equating mercy with weakness. Audrey had survived eight years of torment and still understood justice better than I did.
Dr. Park scheduled surgery to remove the bullet fragment. She warned that waiting increased the risk of renewed inflammation, while operating could destroy the surviving pathways.
“There is a chance you wake with less function than you have now,” she said.
“How much of a chance?”
“Significant.”
Audrey sat beside me.
She did not tell me what to choose.
That mattered.
“I spent eight years letting Roman determine what my body could do,” I said. “I’m done giving him that power.”
The surgery was set for the following morning.
At midnight, Lily sneaked into my room carrying a deck of cards.
“You’re supposed to be asleep.”
“So are you.”
“I’m having spinal surgery.”
“I have math class.”
She said it as if the dangers were equal.
We played three hands. She cheated badly and denied it with confidence.
Before leaving, she placed the locket on my bedside table.
“Miss Addie says this helped her remember who she was.”
“What if I don’t wake up?”
Lily frowned. “Then Dr. Park will yell at you.”
“That is reassuring.”
“She really likes yelling.”
After Lily left, Audrey entered.
She wore my old college sweatshirt over hospital clothes. The sight was so familiar it hurt.
“I don’t know what happens tomorrow,” I said.
“Neither do I.”
“If I wake up unable to move—”
“I’ll be there.”
“If I wake up able to walk—”
“I’ll still be there.”
I took her hand.
“We cannot get back the years.”
“No.”
“But if you want, we can decide what to do with the ones left.”
Audrey intertwined her fingers with mine.
“For tonight, that is enough.”
At six the next morning, nurses prepared me for surgery.
As they wheeled me toward the operating room, the hospital’s network crashed.
The doors locked.
Dr. Park’s surgical team vanished from the electronic schedule.
Then a message appeared on every monitor:
THE KING STAYS IN HIS CHAIR.
May you like
A man wearing Dr. Park’s scrubs stepped from the stairwell with a suppressed pistol.
And this time, his boots were wet.
