"Trace it, Anya," I said. My voice barely a whisper. "Trace every dollar, every transaction, every IP address that has ever touched that account, I want to know who is getting that money. The sun was beginning to streak the sky with gray and pink when Anya found it. The payments from Blackwood Holdings were being funneled through another series of cutouts before landing in a long-term care facility in upstate New York.
A very exclusive, very expensive facility that specialized in patients with severe neurological damage. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. All these years I thought he had abandoned us. I thought he was a coward and a criminal. The shame of it had been the engine driving my success, a constant need to outrun his shadow.
But this This changed everything. He hadn't run. They had taken him. Vance Industries hadn't just bought his company. They had stolen his life's work, framed him for the crime, and then What?
What had they done to him? I was on a private jet before the sun was fully up. The ruined tuxedo from the gala stuffed in a bag in the hold. I didn't care about the government contract anymore. I didn't care about stock prices or board meetings.
This was no longer business. This was a blood feud that had been simmering for two decades. The Vances had built their modern empire on the foundation of my father's stolen genius and my family's ruin. That wine stain on my chest wasn't just an insult. It was the universe spitting a truth in my face that I had been too blind to see.
The facility was discreet, nestled in a quiet, wooded area that looked more like a luxury resort than a hospital. I walked through the polished, sterile hallways, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I gave the receptionist a name I hadn't uttered in 20 years. Ben Thorne. She checked her system and directed me to a room at the end of a quiet wing.
The name on the door didn't say Thorne. It said John Doe. My hand trembled as I pushed the door open. The man in the bed was a shadow of the father I remembered from old photographs. He was gaunt, his hair gray, his eyes open but vacant, staring at a point on the ceiling only he could see.
He was hooked up to machines that beeped and whirred in a steady, monotonous rhythm. A nurse, a kind-faced woman in her 50s, looked up from her chart. "Can I help you? " she asked gently. "I'm his son. " I managed to say, the words feeling foreign and heavy in my mouth. The nurse's expression softened with pity.
"He doesn't get many visitors. I'm sorry, he's not responsive. " A catastrophic car accident, they said. 20 years ago, he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. He's been like this ever since. A car accident.
A convenient, untraceable way to silence a man. I sat by his bedside for an hour, the silence broken only by the beeping of the machines. I told him everything. I told him about my mother, about how I built Innovate Next from the ground up, about the gala. I don't know if he heard me, but I had to say it.