Chapter 89 - The Convergence at Blackwood Manor
Ethan sprinted across the slick, ash-covered concrete, sliding to his knees beside the dying patriarch.
"Charles!" Ethan grabbed his father’s shoulders, pulling him upright.
Charles opened his eyes, blood bubbling at the corners of his lips. He looked at Ethan not with anger, but with a terrible, hollow sorrow.
"Ethan..." the old man rasped, his hand, trembling and cold, reaching up to grip Ethan’s forearm with surprising strength. "Too late... they weren't... they weren't waiting for dawn..."
"Who did this?" Ethan demanded, scanning the shadows of the burning warehouse while Marcus and the operatives formed a defensive ring around them. "Was it the Council?"
"Not the Council..." Charles choked, his breathing growing shallow, erratic. "The Council... was broken yesterday... in the courtroom... when Victoria fell..."
"Then who attacked this place?!"
Charles looked directly into Ethan's eyes, a tear cutting a clean path through the soot on his withered cheek. "The one... who was born before you. The shadow... I couldn't save..."
Ethan froze. "What are you talking about?"
"Erebus... wasn't a protocol, Ethan..." Charles whispered, his life slipping through his fingers like sand. "Erebus... was a person. Your older brother... Julian didn't hide me... he hid *him*... and now... he has the master ledger..."
Charles’s grip slackened. His head fell back, his unseeing eyes staring up into the blazing rafters of the warehouse as the last breath left his body.
The great Charles Sterling—the shadow king of Manhattan, the architect of a billion-dollar web of lies—died on a cold concrete floor in the ruins of his own empire.
"Boss," Marcus called out, his voice sharp with sudden danger. "Movement on the catwalks!"
Ethan lowered his father's body to the floor, his rifle coming up in a single, fluid motion.
High above them, standing on the industrial steel catwalk unaffected by the heat and smoke, stood a tall figure in a tailored black overcoat. The man wore an antique silver pocket watch chain looped through his vest—the exact twin of the heirloom Charles had given Ethan on his eighteenth birthday.
The man stepped into the light of the flames.
He looked identical to Ethan. The same square jaw, the same aristocratic cheekbones, the same piercing, dark eyes—marred only by a long, surgical scar running from his temple down to his collarbone.
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"Hello, little brother," the man said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the roar of the fire. "Father always did love you best. Even gave you the family name while he buried me in an asylum in Zurich."
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