He walked over to the window, the cool night air pressing against the glass. The resort lay sprawled out before him, atapestry of light and shadow. Somewhere out there, Marcus was plotting his next move, secure in his deception.
David turned back to the room, the significance of what he had to do settling on his shoulders like a mantle. Cold now, he grabbed his hoodie from the back of the chair, slipping it on with a determined motion. He had a long night ahead of him, but he was ready.
The door clicked shut behind him as he left to brief his brothers. He strode down the hallway with purpose, his steps echoing in the quiet.
Chapter 48
Shock Front
The rain beganas they entered the boardroom—soft at first, tapping against the tall windows. Beyond the streaked glass, palm trees bent in the wind, reluctant witnesses to the gathering storm.
David sat at the far end of the table, posture rigid in a high-backed chair that molded itself around a thousand sleepless decisions. The leather was cool against his spine, grounding him when every nerve wanted to fire at once. His tablet lay dormant beside his right hand—the simple touch of it a comfort he didn’t want today. Not when the evidence spread before them had little to do with data streams or corrupted code, and everything to do with corrupted souls.
But this one wasn’t business.
This was blood.
“Tell me.” Nick’s voice was level, but it held the rigid composure of a man choosing truth over comfort.
David took a deep breath and laid out what he’d discovered for his brothers. His folders scattered before them like wounds—spilling names, timelines, cross-referenced files pulled from corners of the dark web most techs wouldn’t dare log into. But he had. For Nick. And for the truth.
He’d lost three sleepless nights tracing digital breadcrumbs through encrypted channels, his ability singing through fiber optic cables until his head pounded and his vision blurred.
Chester’s sloppy trail had done what Marcus never would’ve allowed. Arrogant in his cruelty, careless in his execution, he’d left a door for David to kick wide open.
His throat tightened as his gaze landed on Lena’s employee file—the one Marcus had used, annotated, weaponized. The sight of her handwriting on the original application made something twist hard in his chest. She’d been so careful with every letter, as if neatness would protect her from a world proven brutal.
Zach stood at David’s right, arms crossed, storm-gray eyes skimming the documentation like radar, scanning for weaknesses, traces of a plan. His stillness was deceptive—a pressure chamber waiting to blow. Rage radiated off him in palpable waves, the muscle jumping in his jaw every time his eyes landed on another piece of evidence. His hand rested near his hip, fingers twitching over his knife. Even here, in their private boardroom, his brother was ready for war.
“We knew something deeper was going on,” Zach said, voice gravel-edged. “We just didn’t know it had teeth this old.”
The words settled over the room like ash. David had developed so much of their digital empire from this very chair, but all that power was meaningless now. He couldn’t firewall a psychopath. He couldn’t encrypt away an obsession that had festered for more than a decade.
Nick sat in his usual seat at the head of the room, fingers steepled beneath his chin. His expression was unreadable—composed in a way perfected over years of boardroom negotiations—but his foot tapped under the table. David’s mind buzzed in the silence that followed as a telepathic static built between them like an approaching electrical storm. Nick washolding something back, wrestling with memories David could almost taste on the air.
“It was always Marcus,” Nick’s voice carried the burden of recognition that came too late. “Even when it wasn’t.”
David nodded once, eyes locked on the image at the center—Marcus’s slick, ageless smile in a group photo from years ago. Standing far enough behind Nick’s mother to claim innocence, but near enough to drink in every moment she wasn’t offering. The photo was sepia-toned, but Marcus’s fascination was crystalline in its intensity. Those blue eyes weren’t looking at the camera. They were fixed on her with a hunger that never died, only transformed into something darker.
“I remember him,” David’s hand moved to his temple, where a phantom ache was building from the residue of memories rising from their grave. “He was always lurking around your mother. Today, we would have labeled him a stalker. Back then?”
Back then, they’d been kids. They had no reason to understand the difference between admiration and obsession, between devotion and disease.
Not to mention they hadn’t cared about Nick’s mother, who had abandoned Nick to be raised by the butler. Luckily for all three of them, that butler had been Marguerite.
The rain intensified outside, drumming against the glass. The sound filled the void, relentless as the truth they were facing.
Nick’s voice was brittle. “Mother never appeared to notice that he followed her around like a sick puppy. Or maybe she did, and she liked the attention.” Pain threaded through every syllable. David recognized that tone—a son trying to reconcile the woman he still believed he should have loved with the woman she had actually been.
“He didn’t love her,” the certainty in his own voice surprised him. After hours of analyzing Marcus’s digital footprint, tracking the evolution of a mind coming apart at the seams, he knew. “He was obsessed with her. And from what I’ve found, his mental state has only declined.”
“How?” Nick asked.
David pulled another folder toward him, this one containing psychiatric evaluations Marcus had somehow buried, therapy notes from sessions abandoned, prescription records for medications not taken. “It looks like he’s fixated on you—and that includes everything you love. Us. Marguerite. Now he knows Kate and Lena are in the picture.”
The names hung in the air like targets. David’s throat constricted when he said Lena’s name aloud. She’d been through so much—the harassment, the false accusations, the fear that haunted her. To learn it was all part of some sick revenge fantasy, that she’d been chosen because of him…
Zach broke from his stance, leaned in, and pointed at the thin thread connecting Chester to a shell company registered offshore before tracing another down to Wilson. His finger left a slight smudge on the glossy surface. “He was stacking pawns. And we’re just starting to see the board.”
