Chapter 4: The House of Lies
Inside the Sterling mansion, the tension was thick enough to choke on. Eleanor had barricaded herself in the library with Lily and Elias, while guards loyal to her—not to her husband—stood outside the door.
Lily sat on the floor, holding Elias’s hand. He was clean now, scrubbed of the filth of the streets, but he was still trembling. He kept looking at the door, expecting his father to burst in.
"Dad did this?" Lily asked, her voice quiet.
"Your father," Eleanor said, staring out the window at the gardens, "is a man who values legacy over life. He thought Elias, born out of wedlock before we were married, was a threat to his political ambitions. He didn't kill him because he couldn't bring himself to commit murder, but he exiled him. He paid people to dump him in the slums, and he paid me to believe he was dead."
Eleanor turned, her eyes burning with a newfound fury. "He kept me in a cage of grief for five years. He used my sadness to control me. He made me the perfect, broken trophy wife."
"We have to expose him," Lily said.
May you like
"We can't just expose him," Eleanor replied. "He controls the police, the media, the board. We need to dismantle him."
Elias looked up, his eyes hardening. He was no longer the street boy; he was the son of a woman who had just woken up. "I know where he keeps the ledgers. The ones he hid in the floorboards under his desk. I heard them talking. The men who took me. They were afraid of 'The Red Book'."
