I caught my husband kissing my older sister in my mother’s kitchen while twenty people celebrated my father’s sixty-fifth birthday in the next room. / Chapter 64 / 120

Chapter 64 - The Masquerade of Sins

The revelation hit me like a physical blow. The quiet old man who had smiled politely across the dining room table, who had barely spoken between bites of roasted lamb, who had excused himself early because of a "migraine"—it hadn't been Dad at all. It had been a double, a grotesque placeholder while Victoria systematically looted the estate’s corporate holdings.

"Eleanor," I said into the radio, my voice dropping into a deadly, ice-cold register I didn't recognize as my own. "Where are you now?"

*“I’m locked in the penthouse suite at the Grand Metropole,”* Eleanor wept. *“She took my biometric cards. She’s using Julian as the secondary trustee signature. If they sign the sovereign transfer at the Gala tonight, the Thorne dynasty disappears into the Blackwater Trust forever, and no authority on earth will ever be able to trace what happened to Father.”*

"Is Julian cooperating?" Liam interjected, leaning into the microphone.

*“Julian has no choice,”* Eleanor gasped. *“Mother told him that if he signs, he gets a ten-million-dollar payout and a new identity in South America. If he refuses, she’ll dump his body off the continental shelf. Maya... please. I was weak. I was a coward. But you can't let her win. She killed him. She killed our dad.”*

The connection abruptly died with a burst of static, followed by the dull, rhythmic click of a terminated line.

Liam looked at me, his jaw set in stone. He bandaged his own shoulder with a swift, brutal jerk of medical tape, not flinching once. "The Grand Metropole Gala. Every corrupt financier, oligarch, and shadow broker on the eastern seaboard will be in that ballroom tonight. It’s an impenetrable fortress."

"Good," I said, walking over to the weapons locker Liam had cracked open in the corner of the cellar. I picked up a matte-black suppressed automatic, checked the slide, and slotted the magazine home with a clean, sharp snap. "Because I don't plan on sneaking in."

"What's the play, Maya?" Liam asked, a dark, approving grin touching the corner of his lips.

"We walk through the front door," I said, meeting his gaze. "My mother spent her whole life setting a public stage to humiliate me. She wants an audience? I’m going to give her one she’ll never forget."

We had two hours. Liam procured high-end formal wear from a discreet cache in the safehouse—a tailored midnight-black tuxedo for him, and for me, an emerald-green silk backless gown that concealed two ceramic daggers along the spine and a micro-EMP transmitter sewn into the hem.

When we emerged into the cold city streets thirty minutes later, the transformation was complete. We were no longer prey running through sea caves.