Chapter 6 - The Bloodline Deception
I returned to my command trailer parked at the edge of the Oakridge municipal sports track, the very field where I had trained until my lungs burned as a teenager. The local track was rusted, the bleachers rotting, and the lanes overgrown with weeds—a forgotten monument to the youth I had sacrificed.
A black sedan pulled up, and my security officers escorted Edward into the trailer. The man looked broken, his shoulders slumped, his eyes hollow as he stared at the high-tech wall of surveillance monitors displaying Julian's Miami accounts.
"Sit down, Edward," I commanded, pointing at a steel folding chair across from my desk. Edward sat down slowly, his hands trembling so violently he had to tuck them between his knees to hide his shame.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, looking directly into his sunken eyes. "Why did you smash my trophy, forge the runaway report, and steal Harold's trust to give everything to Julian?"
Edward broke down, burying his face in his wrinkled palms, sobbing with the pathetic agony of a man whose sins had caught up with him. "Arthur... Julian's father... he had photographs, Lucas."
I leaned forward, my gaze turning razor-sharp. "Photographs of what?"
"Thirty years ago, when Harold was writing his final will, I was drowning in four million dollars of illegal trading debts," Edward wept. "Arthur caught me trying to forge Harold's signature on a corporate asset transfer; he threatened to send me to federal prison unless I agreed to share Harold's trust with his family."
"So to save your own pathetic skin from prison, you made a pact with Arthur to sacrifice your own seventeen-year-old son," I said, the disgust in my voice hitting him like a hammer. "You watched me run twelve miles every morning in the snow, you watched me work at the gas station to buy running shoes, and you plotted how to destroy me."
"Arthur insisted that Julian had to be the public face of the dynasty!" Edward cried, looking up with desperate, pleading eyes. "Julian had the charm, the charisma, the high-society connections; Arthur said if we invested Harold's eighty-five million into Julian's education and funds, we would all be billionaires!"
"And instead, Julian stole every cent you gave him, gambled it away in underground European casinos, and left you with twelve million dollars of mob debt," I said, leaning back in my chair. "You traded a son who would have conquered the world for a con artist who sold your house out from under your feet."
"Lucas, please, I am your father!" Edward screamed, reaching across the table to grasp my sleeve. "Blood is blood, you cannot leave your own mother and father with nothing, you have billions!"
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I pulled my arm away with effortless force, looking down at him with utter, unshakeable contempt. "You stopped being my father the second your work boot came down on that gold runner."
"Get him out of my sight," I instructed my security detail, turning back to my monitors. "Put him in a motel on the highway, and make sure he watches the evening news tonight."
