Chapter 46 - The Stepmother’s Puppet
Arthur rose slowly, leaning against the cold stone pillar as I approached him. His face was pale, his breath misting heavily in the drafty air, but his eyes were clear, fierce, and entirely lucid.
"You fly like your grandfather, Lucas," he said quietly, his voice trembling with an emotion he fought hard to conceal. "And you shoot like someone who had to survive on the streets."
"I survived in Economy, Father," I replied, meeting his gaze without flinching. "Where Evelyn sent me while she drained your empire dry."
Arthur's jaw clenched until the muscle ticked. He stepped forward and placed a heavy, gloved hand on my shoulder. For the first time in ten years, there was no barrier between us—no stepmother whispering poison into his ear, no fabricated balance sheets making me look like an incompetent wastrel.
"She told me you stole from the offshore pension trust," Arthur said, the agony of the past decade bleeding into his words. "She showed me digital signatures, bank slips, flight manifests indicating you were running drugs through our Latin American routes. She manufactured a ghost to replace my son."
"And you believed her," I said, not with anger, but with the cold finality of truth.
"I doubted," Arthur said hoarsely. "And because I doubted, I lost your mother. I allowed Evelyn to isolate me here while she took control of the board. But I left one contingency in place. The bearer shares in your grandfather's vault—the ones that could only be redeemed by someone sitting in Seat 1B."
"Why Seat 1B?" I asked.
Arthur smiled a bleak, wintery smile. "Because that was the seat your mother occupied on our very first test flight across the Atlantic. Eleanor programmed the flight manifest herself. No one could claim the Vance Sovereign Reserve unless they boarded under that exact passenger identity."
A muffled scream from the aircraft stairway cut through the stillness.
Clara had dragged Victoria down the metal boarding stairs. My stepsister's designer coat was torn, her blonde hair tangled with sweat and soot, mascara running down her flushed cheeks. She fell onto her knees on the frozen hangar floor, staring up at Arthur in absolute horror.
"Uncle Arthur! Please!" she sobbed, abandoning her arrogant posture completely. "I didn't know! Mama told me it was just an asset transfer! She told me Lucas was going to sell the airline to foreign liquidators! She didn't tell me about... about that machine!"
Arthur looked down at Victoria with utter disgust, as if examining a rat that had crawled out of a sewer.
"You wore Eleanor's emerald necklace to the board meeting last week, Victoria," Arthur said, his voice deadly quiet. "You signed the extradition order that would have left my son in a black-site prison in Reykjavik. Did your mother tell you to do that, too?"
Victoria trembled violently, looking between Arthur and me. "I... I can give you the frequency! I can tell you where she is!"
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I knelt down in front of her, grabbing her chin and forcing her eyes to meet mine. "You're going to tell us everything, Victoria. And if you lie by a single coordinate, I will personally strip you of your passport, leave you here in this sub-zero hangar, and watch you experience what being broke actually feels like."
***
