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 76 / 120

Chapter 76 - The Architect’s Decoy

Silence stretched over the line, broken only by Eleanor's shallow, ragged breathing. For a moment, I thought she had hung up. When she spoke again, the hysteria had retreated, replaced by a hollow, terrifying despair.

"What are you talking about?" she whispered.

"Julian is a plant, Eleanor. His real family sits on the council of the Grand Circle. He didn't sleep with you because he wanted you. He slept with you because Victoria needed our father's bloodline split in half before Arthur could trigger his sovereign trust."

"No..." she stammered, the denial cracking in her throat. "No, he loved me! He chose me over you!"

"He chose you because you were the weaker link!" I snapped, the brutal truth cutting through the phone line like a scalpel. "He knew you would burn down the entire family just to feel superior to me for five minutes! And now you're calling me to save him?"

"Maya... they're outside," she sobbed, all pretense of pride finally shattering into dust. "There are black sedans parked down my street. They cut my power ten minutes ago. If you don't come to the Conservatory, they aren't just going to kill Julian. They're going to come through my front door."

I looked at Liam. He had stopped typing on the decrypted drive. He looked at me, his eyes dark with understanding and unyielding support. He didn't tell me what to do. He left the choice entirely in my hands.

"Stay away from the windows," I told Eleanor. "Don't touch the lights. If anyone knocks, do not open that door. We'll be at the Conservatory at midnight. But hear me clearly, Eleanor—if this is an ambush, if you've set me up one more time, I won't save you. I will leave you to whatever monsters you invited into our home."

I ended the call and tossed the phone onto the table.

"It's a trap," Liam said quietly, his voice level.

"Of course it's a trap," I replied, walking over to the fireplace and watching the embers glow red against the hearth. "The Blackthorn Conservatory has been closed since my grandfather died. It's built entirely of reinforced iron and glass, surrounded by twelve acres of private woods. It’s an amphitheater for an execution."

"Then we don't walk in the front door," Liam said, turning his monitor toward me.

The decryption protocol on the drive had finally bypassed the third layer of security. Spread across the screen were the original architectural blueprints of the Blackthorn estate—along with a private tunnel network constructed during Prohibition that bypassed every modern security system the Circle might have installed.

"Arthur didn't build this tunnel for liquor," Liam pointed out, his finger tracing a red line beneath the conservatory’s central fountain. "He built it as an emergency extraction route. If he's really there, he expects us to use it."

"And if he's not?" I asked. "If it's Victoria's loyalists using my father's memory as bait?"

Liam stood up, checked the magazine of his tactical rifle, and slid it into a rugged duffle bag alongside flashbangs, zip-ties, and our encrypted comms.