The sling was black silk and was custom-made, just like the suit, designed to hold my arm at a precise forty-five-degree angle enough to show injury.
I stood behind the podium in the Thorne Tower. The glass wall behind me soared fifty stories up, framing the grey Chicago sky. In front of me, a sea of cameras flashed in a strobe-light rhythm that made my headache pound in time with my pulse.
"Yesterday," I began, my voice amplified across the silent lobby and broadcast to millions of screens worldwide, "a coordinated terrorist attack struck St. Jude's Cathedral."
I paused and looked directly into the lens of the CNN camera. I didn't blink.
"These cowards sought to destroy the memory of my father. They sought to destroy the leadership of this company and all those of my guests. They thought that by attacking a funeral, they would find easy prey."
I gripped the podium with my good hand.
"They were wrong."
A murmur rippled through the press pool. Beside me, Sterling, the General Counsel, stood with his hands clasped, looking. Behind him, the surviving Board members stood in a phalanx of support. They weren't supporting me because they liked me but because I was the only one left standing.
"The perpetrators were members of an international criminal syndicate and they have been killed," I continued. "Security forces, working in conjunction with state authorities, repelled the assault. Regrettably, lives were lost but the message they tried to send has been returned to sender."
I took a breath. The pain in my left shoulder was a dull, throbbing roar under the painkillers, but I used it and let it sharpen my focus.
"There has been speculation regarding the future of Thorne Industries. Speculation about an interim leadership."
I looked at Arthur Vance's empty chair in the front row.
"Let me be clear. There is no vacuum. Effective immediately, I am assuming the role of Chief Executive Officer, Not Acting. Not Interim."
I leaned forward.
"I am the Chairman and the transition is complete. The stock is stable and anyone betting against this family..."
I let the threat hang there, unfinished.
"Thank you. No questions."
I turned and walked away.
"Mr. Thorne! Mr. Thorne!"
"What about the gas leak investigation?"
"Is it true Don Varga was inside?"
The questions bounced off my back as security take me toward the private elevators.
Inside the car, the noise of the world cut off instantly. Sterling exhaled a breath he seemed to have been holding for twenty minutes.
"Stock is up twelve percent," he said, checking his phone "The narrative held as 'Heroic Son Defends Father's Legacy.' The Governor just issued a statement praising your bravery."
"Send him a thank you note," I said, leaning against the glass wall of the elevator. My adrenaline was crashing and the pain was coming back "And a donation."
"Already done," Sterling said. He looked at me, a flicker of genuine fear in his eyes "You did good, David. Your father... he would have been surprised."
"No," I said, watching the floor numbers climb "He wouldn't have been."
The elevator dinged at the 50th floor. The Executive Suite.
"I need the room, Sterling," I said "I have work to do."
"Of course, Mr. Chairman."
He stepped out, leaving me alone in the sanctuary of glass and steel.
My father's office was exactly as I had left cold, and commanding. The city sprawled out below, a grid of lights that I now officially owned.
I walked to the desk and sat in the high-backed leather chair. It didn't feel too big anymore, It felt like a cockpit.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tablet.
It sat on the glass surface, dark and silent. It was the architect of my victory. It had killed my enemies and made me a billionaire.
But it hadn't told me about the Men in Black.
And it hadn't told me about File 001.
The euphoria of the press conference evaporated, replaced by a cold knot of dread in my stomach. The voice on the phone the tapping code echoed in my mind.
Don't trust the General.
Check File 001.
I looked at the door.
I looked at the windows. Bulletproof.
I was safe.
I tapped the screen, The blue light washed over my face.
I navigated to the root directory. There it was a single, encrypted file sitting at the very bottom of the system architecture.
FILE: 001
DATE: 1998-06-12
TYPE: VIDEO LOG
STATUS: ARCHIVED.
I was two years old.
My hand hovered over the icon. Part of me wanted to delete it because I had won. Why dig up ghosts? Why complicate the perfect narrative I had just sold to the world?
But the ghost of my mother's signal....Tap. Tap....forced my hand.
I pressed OPEN.
The screen flickered. Then, a video feed resolved.
It wasn't the high-definition, digitally enhanced footage the tablet usually provided. This was raw, low-light footage from a hidden camera.
The timestamp in the corner read: JUNE 12, 1998. 02:14 AM.
The location was a bedroom and I recognized the wallpaper. It was the master suite of our old house the one we lived in before the mansion.
A woman was sitting on the edge of the bed.
My mother.
She looked so young and her hair was long, spilling over her shoulders. She was wearing a silk nightgown. She was crying, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
The door to the room opened.
A man stepped in.
The camera angle was high, mounted in a vent I guess. The man's face was obscured by the shadows and the angle of his entry. All I could see was his back, wide shoulders, and a dark shirt.
He shut the door. He locked it.
My mother looked up and her face was a mask of terror. She scrambled back on the bed, pulling her knees to her chest.
"Please," she whispered. The audio was tinny, but clear "Please, Marcus is coming home tomorrow. You can't be here."
"Marcus isn't coming home," the man said. His voice was low, distorted by the poor audio quality, unrecognizable "Not until I tell him to."
He walked toward the bed.
"Leave me alone," my mother begged "I did what you asked. I signed the papers and gave you the access codes."
"It's not about the codes anymore, Elizabeth," the man said.
He reached out.
I watched, frozen in horror, as the man grabbed my mother's ankle and dragged her down the mattress. She screamed, but he clamped a hand over her mouth, The struggle was violent and desperate.
"Turn it off," I whispered to the empty room.
But I couldn't move but I couldn't look away.
It was a violation. Raw and unfiltered, It wasn't the clean violence of a gunshot rather it was the messy, soul-destroying violence of domination.
I slammed my hand onto the tablet, pausing the video just as the man pinned her down.
I couldn't breathe. My chest felt tight, like the sling was strangling me.
"Deepfake," I gasped. "It has to be."
It was a fabrication. Someone had planted this to break me, maybe The Syndicate? A failsafe?
I tapped the screen with trembling fingers.
VERIFY AUTHENTICITY.
The tablet processed.
ANALYSIS: BIOMETRIC MATCH CONFIRMED.
SOURCE: ORIGINAL ANALOG TAPE (DIGITIZED).
CRYPTOGRAPHIC SIGNATURE: MARCUS THORNE.
PROBABILITY OF FORGERY: 0.00%.
Zero percent.
"No," I screamed "It's impossible."
I hit play again as I needed to find the flaw. I needed to find the glitch that proved it was a lie.
The video continued. The struggle on the bed, My mother's hand flailing, knocking a lamp off the nightstand.
And then I saw it.
In the chaos of the movement, her nightgown tore at the shoulder. Exposed on her upper arm, just below the shoulder, was a dark, purple bruise. It was shaped like a handprint.
But it wasn't just a bruise her arm was bent at a sickening angle.
Snap.
The sound of the bone breaking was faint on the audio, but unmistakable.
I stopped the video again.
I stared at her arm.
I remembered that summer, 1998. I was very young, I remembered my mother wearing long sleeves in July and I remembered her arm in a cast.
"I fell down the stairs, David," she had told me, years later when I asked about the old photos "I was clumsy and tripped on a toy."
She hadn't fallen down the stairs.
He had broken her arm.
The realization hit me harder than the bullet in the cathedral.
My mother wasn't "unstable." She wasn't "crazy." She was a survivor of torture.
And my father... the file signature said MARCUS THORNE.
He had this video. He had it archived and kept it in the root directory of his legacy.
Why?
Did he record it? Or did he find it later?
If he found it later, why didn't he kill the man? Why did he let this monster live?
Unless...
I looked at the frozen image of the man on the screen. Back turned. Shadowed.
Who was he?
I needed to see his face. I needed to know who had destroyed my mother's life before I was even old enough to remember it.
I hit play one last time.
The video played on and the assault ended. The man stood up, adjusting his clothes. He turned toward the door.
He walked under the camera.
For a split second, the light from the hallway caught him.
I leaned in, my nose almost touching the screen.
I didn't see a face as the shadows were too deep.
But as he reached for the doorknob, his shirt torn in the struggle slightly shifted.
And there, on the upper left side of his chest, revealed for just a fraction of a second, was a tattoo.
I froze the frame.
I zoomed in.
It was a black geometric shape. A triangle intersecting with a circle inside the circle was a wolf's head, stylized, jagged.
I knew that tattoo.
I had seen it three days ago.
In the underground bunker beneath the bookstore.
The world tilted on its axis.
I wasn't the King or the CEO.
I was a fool.
I looked at the tattoo and then I looked at the door of my office, wondering if it was locked tight enough.
Because the man with that tattoo was the one who execute the Syndicate with me.
He was the one standing next to me at the funeral.
He was the one who told me to kill.
I whispered the name, and the taste of it was poison.
"Uncle Silas."