Chapter 12: Buried Truths and New Wars
The journal weighed more than it should have.
Elara gripped it tightly as she rode the elevator back to the estate, its pages humming with secrets that seemed to pulse against her skin. She hadn't slept in over thirty-six hours, yet her mind was electric, overcharged with adrenaline, grief, and an awakening hunger that no one, not even Damien, had ever seen in her before.
In the safety of her father's study, she locked the door and laid the journal flat on the desk. The pages were brittle but preserved. Lines of his handwriting sloped with precision, filled with formulas, initials, and cryptic references that demanded decoding.
She didn't need to read far to understand one thing:
The collapse of Vance Corp wasn't a tragedy. It was a silencing.
And her father had known it was coming.
Elsewhere in the city, Damien stood before his mother in the Blackwood manor's atrium. The glass ceiling filtered dawn light over marble floors. Isadora Blackwood looked every inch the sovereign she fancied herself, a vision in charcoal gray, her expression unmovable.
"You gave her the drive," she said, not a question.
Damien's jaw clenched. "She deserved the truth."
"You've compromised everything."
"I've balanced it."
Isadora turned slowly, pouring tea with practiced grace. "Elara is no longer a girl mourning her father. She's dangerous now. She knows just enough to start a war."
Damien didn't respond.
She added, "And you've fallen for her."
That earned her silence. But his eyes spoke for him.
"You're just like your father," Isadora said. "Soft where it matters most."
"I'm exactly like my father," Damien replied coldly. "Which is why I know when a legacy becomes a cage."
Back at the estate, Elara and Naomi worked through the journal with surgical intensity. The entries led them down a path of covert research, biomedical technology years ahead of public knowledge. Her father hadn't just been working on ethical drug testing. He had cracked the framework for predictive immunotherapy, a model that could forecast an individual's response to medication before ingestion.
It would have changed everything.
And it would have bankrupted pharmaceutical empires, including those funding Arclight.
The pieces began falling into place. The sabotage, the hostile acquisition, the sudden withdrawal of board members loyal to her father.
Naomi looked up from the decrypted files. "This wasn't just corporate betrayal. This was premeditated erasure."
"And it's not over," Elara said. "They didn't just want the company. They wanted the discovery buried."
Later that night, Elara stood on the balcony overlooking the rain soaked city. The lights of Blackwood Tower blinked in the distance, their glow taunting her. Behind her, Damien stepped quietly into the room.
"I've read the journal," she said without turning.
"I figured you would."
"Did you know what my father was working on?"
"I knew pieces. But not like this."
She faced him then, eyes burning. "You should've told me everything."
"I was protecting you."
"No," she said, voice rising. "You were controlling the pace of my revenge."
His gaze didn't flinch. "And would you have listened if I told you before you were ready?"
She faltered. Because the truth was, she wouldn't have
"I'm ready now," she said.
"Then we go to war."
They laid the groundwork over the following days.
Naomi created a digital leak plan, internal documents, blacklists, boardroom recordings. Luca provided access to a dormant account seeded with funds her father had left in her name, enough to buy back critical patents.
And Elara?
She prepared for blood.
But before they could act, the war found them first.
A fire erupted at one of the last remaining Vance research labs. The blaze destroyed everything. Files, prototypes, evidence. It was no accident.
Elara stood before the smoking ruins, fists clenched.
"This was Isadora," Naomi said.
"No," Elara replied.
She held up a scorched corner of a familiar envelope.
"This was Julian."
Julian Thorne had always been quiet in his villainy, more serpent than wolf. He thrived in chaos, but preferred to be its architect, not its executor. For him to make such a bold move? It meant desperation.
Or something worse.
He was no longer in the shadows.
He was challenging her directly.
"He's trying to send a message," Damien said, after Naomi briefed them on the security breach.
Elara stared at the embers. "Then let's answer him with a louder one."
They convened at an old tech warehouse on the outskirts of the city, neutral ground turned war room. Elara gathered her team: Naomi, Luca, Damien, and two trusted former Vance Corp engineers who had defected after the collapse.
They called themselves the Last Circle.
"This is no longer just about reclaiming Vance Corp," Elara said. "It's about exposing every player who made my father's death possible. And dismantling them one by one."
She pulled up a projection of Julian's known companies. Then another list, names of board members from Arclight's subsidiaries.
"Pattern recognition," Naomi explained. "They're all interconnected through front investments. But there's one name that stands out, Dr. Halden Reyes."
Luca stiffened. "That's not possible. Reyes disappeared after the Biovault incident."
"He's resurfaced," Naomi said. "Under a new alias. And he's working with Julian."
Elara's voice went ice-cold. "Then we find him."
Tracking Reyes took days. He was operating out of a private medical facility in Zurich, registered under a false identity. Getting to him would require finesse.
Elara volunteered herself.
Damien protested, but she silenced him with a glance. "You taught me to fight. Now let me use what I've learned."
In Zurich, she posed as a biotech investor and secured a meeting. She walked into the clinic alone, wearing her mother's emerald brooch and a silk blazer, power stitched into her very frame.
Dr. Reyes didn't recognize her at first. But the moment she dropped her pseudonym, his color drained.
"Miss Vance"
"Don't call me that. You lost that right the moment you sold my father's work to the highest bidder."
He tried to flee. But the clinic's security system, hacked expertly by Naomi, sealed the doors.
"I'm not here for revenge," Elara said, stepping closer. "I'm here for everything you stole."
In the confrontation that followed, she extracted not just confessions, but data. Encrypted backups. Locations. Partners.
Reyes gave her everything.
Because she offered him a deal worse than death.
Survival in obscurity.
Or destruction in infamy.
He chose the former.
Back in the city, she uploaded the data to Naomi's system. It was the final piece they needed. With it, they could expose Julian, bring down the false arms of Arclight, and begin reclaiming her family's legacy.
But as she watched the files load, something else appeared on the screen.
A message.
We see you.
Naomi cursed. "They're in our system."
And just like that, the lights in the estate flickered.
Power cut.
The war wasn't just corporate anymore.
It was personal.
And it had only just begun.