Chapter 17 - Eleanor's Darkest Confession
"Lower the gun, Arthur," Evelyn said, her voice matching the woman on the phone perfectly.
"You were in the morgue," Arthur breathed, disbelief cracking his composure. "You examined the body."
"I delivered the body," she corrected, a thin, triumphant smirk curling her lips. "She was my younger sister."
"You sacrificed your own blood just to stage an attack?"
"She volunteered," Evelyn said coldly. "She knew she was dying of leukemia. She wanted her final act to strike fear into your grandmother's black heart."
Two of Arthur's men moved to flank her, but Evelyn casually raised a small digital detonator between her fingers.
"Take another step, and three hundred pounds of C-4 lined along the building's foundation will turn this entire street into a crater."
Arthur raised his hand, halting his operators immediately.
"You wanted the files," Arthur said, nodding toward the leather satchel. "Take them. Let the city go."
"I don't just want the files, Arthur. I want you to read them."
She tossed a thick, yellowed folder onto the cold marble floor between them.
The red wax seal had been recently broken.
"Pick it up," she commanded. "See what your beloved grandmother traded for your family's precious legacy."
Arthur kept his weapon trained on her with his right hand while kneeling down to scoop up the folder with his left.
He flipped the cover open under the glare of his tactical light.
Inside were passenger manifests, cargo registries, and signed execution orders stamped with the Hawthorne family seal.
At the bottom of the final authorization was a signature Arthur recognized with absolute horror.
It wasn't his grandfather’s handwriting.
The looping, elegant script belonged to Eleanor Hawthorne, signed fifty years ago when she was just twenty-two years old.
"Your grandfather was a coward who couldn't stomach the dirty work," Evelyn whispered, her voice echoing in the vault. "Eleanor was the architect. She ordered the scuttling of the refugee vessel to collect the Lloyd’s of London insurance payout."
Arthur stared at the ink, the reality crashing down upon him like an avalanche.
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The entire dynasty—the estates, the banks, the political connections, his very existence—was funded by mass murder.
"She raised you to be pure, Arthur," Evelyn mocked softly. "A gentle prince sitting on a mountain of skulls."
