THEODORE'S POV
A few things happened today.
A lot has been happening in my life since before I can remember. But today compressed a lifetime's worth of violence and revelation into a span of hours. And I'm sitting in the aftermath, trying to reassemble something that no longer fits together.
It started with the small camera in the flower vase on Beatrice's desk — the one I placed months ago, the one I use to watch her when nobody else is looking. Her small pout when the accounts don't reconcile. The scrunch of her nose that makes her oddly adorable. The way she leans back in her chair and stares at the ceiling when she's thinking hard, lips moving silently through numbers.
All of that vanished in an instant. Replaced by Rosie's hand gripping Beatrice's ear, pulling the Schweitzer heirloom with enough force to tear skin, and Beatrice — my Beatrice — crying and bleeding while asking her to stop.
What I felt in that moment wasn't something I could control.
Rage erupted through my veins like something caged and starving that had finally been fed. I called Lucas. Told him to breach the security system of the Laurent mansion in the Upper East Side. Every layer. Every protocol. Now.
The thirteen-tier surveillance system. Thirty elite guards on constant rotation. One of the most fortified residences in the nation. Lucas and I sat in my black G-Wagon — no plates — across the road, and I watched him dismantle their digital architecture from his phone, layer by layer, like peeling skin from fruit.
I've had access to their system for years. I just never had reason to use it.
"Thirty-minute window," Lucas said. His eyes were dark with the familiar tension that surfaces whenever he knows I've crossed the line between strategy and something more primal. But Lucas isn't the kind of man who tries to stop a storm. He just drives through it.
Black contact lenses. Leather gloves. Balaclava. Boots two sizes too large. A padded jacket to distort my frame.
And then I was inside.
One gate. Two gates. The garden muddy from earlier rain. Rosie's bedroom directly above — balcony accessible from the eastern wall. I climbed up.
Her balcony was lined with white roses. Blooming. The knife in my pocket was cold.
I entered through the balcony door. Lights dimmed. She was on her bed, phone pressed to her ear, speaking to Olivia.
"I swear I'm going to ruin this girl. Because of her, my brother shouted at me. He was rude to you. Just wait — I'll make her life a living hell."
My hand trembled. Not from fear. From the effort of restraining myself from something permanent.
Lucas's voice came through the earpiece — rough, urgent: "You're not here to kill her. Medical stab only. This is also about escalation among the families."
Rosie continued, oblivious: "Don't worry, Olivia. We'll do something about that sl—"
I cut the call by pulling the phone from her hand. My palm clamped over her mouth before the scream could form. Her eyes went wide — white with terror, tears spilling instantly, body convulsing with the instinct to fight.
"Medical stab," Lucas repeated in my ear. Holding the reins of my bloodlust with his voice alone.
I drove the blade into her side. Below the ribcage. Three inches. Precise angle — missing every organ, puncturing only soft tissue. Enough to hospitalize. Enough to scar. Enough to make her tremble every time she sees a figure in a dark jacket for the rest of her life.
She crumpled. Blood pooled against the white sheets. I walked out through the bedroom, knocking objects off surfaces — creating noise, creating chaos, creating the impression of a hurried escape that would give the forensic team something to analyze while finding nothing useful.
I dropped from the balcony. Landed on my feet. Reached the car in ninety seconds. Behind me, the Laurent mansion erupted into alarm — lights flooding on, shouting cascading through hallways, security scrambling toward a threat that had already left the building.
Lucas drove. I let the blood on my gloves dry.
I made soup. Drove to Beatrice's apartment. Held her while she cried. Kissed her forehead with the same hands.
I felt no guilt about Rosie.
Not a flicker. Not a shadow.
She made my Sonnenschein cry and bleed for no reason. She simply paid for it.
Back at the headquarters, I fed everything I'd worn to the fireplace. Boots, gloves, balaclava, jacket, knife. Flames engulfed the evidence with a violence that felt appropriate.
I stood under the shower. Cold water slamming against my back — against the tattoo that covers what used to be visible there.
A dragon stretching across my entire back. Coiling tight, every scale sharp enough to look like it could cut through the ink itself. Claws gripping my shoulders. Wings spread wide, spine-tipped. The tail lashing across my lower back. The head snarling outward — teeth bared, eyes burning, smoke and flame curling up my spine.
Black and grey shading that makes it look alive. Dangerous. Impossible to ignore.
The dragon covers seventeen years of whip scars.
Long, pale, raised lines that my father put there starting when I could barely walk. After I became patriarch at twenty-two, I had Lucas tattoo over every one of them. Not to forget — to reclaim. The marks of a victim transformed into the markings of something that bites back.
Only Lucas and I know what's underneath the ink. Only we know the dragon is a tombstone for a childhood that ended before it began.
A knock on the bathroom door. My assistant Dylan's voice: "Boss, Mr. and Mrs. Laurent have arrived in New York."
I dry off. Pull on a fresh white t-shirt and grey sweatpants. The real response begins now.
Ludwig Laurent won't absorb this quietly. His beloved daughter is lying in a hospital bed, unconscious and bleeding, from an attack inside his own fortress. That man will go to war — and when Ludwig goes to war, he causes collateral damage across every family and every layer of the underworld.
Exactly as I intended.
Nobody will suspect me. The logic doesn't support it. Theodore Schweitzer's conflict with the Laurents has always been financial — market manipulation, intelligence leverage, boardroom chess. Physical assault on a family member would be an irrational escalation. Beneath me. Beneath the Schweitzer methodology.
What nobody understands is that I was never rational. I simply did what brought profit. I'm a banker. But the moment this stopped being about profit and became about Beatrice — rationality became a luxury I could no longer afford.
I would set the world on fire and watch it burn if something happened to her.
I sit down. Six monitors. Hot chocolate from the corner shop that Lucas knows is the only one I'll drink from. He settles into the chair beside me.
"Did you get the chocolates from that place on the corner?"
He nods. "Your sweet tooth is going to get me fired if it's from anywhere else."
I nod and turn to the feeds. Laurent estate. The scene is already unfolding — Jennifer in the study, Adrien across from her, Ludwig between them. Standard post-crisis dynamics. Emotional parents, stoic heir, the machinery of a family processing trauma.
Jennifer slaps Adrien. Screams about the breach. Ludwig comforts her. Adrien absorbs it. The same posture he held in the warehouse — nine years old and already trained to take the hit without showing it.
Standard.
Then Jennifer says it.
"You are not my son."
My body freezes. My hand stops halfway to the hot chocolate.
Lucas leans forward. "What did she just —"
"Replay." My voice is barely audible.
We watch it again. Jennifer's face contorted with thirty-four years of suppressed resentment. Ludwig's panic — visible, desperate, the panic of a man who built a house on a lie and is watching the foundation crack in real time. And Adrien — standing in the center of the room with an expression that looks like someone reached inside his chest and removed something.
"You are the son of my elder sister and your father."
Lucas's face goes white. "Adrien's mother isn't Jennifer Laurent?"
I put the hot chocolate down. Slowly. Like moving too fast might shatter something that's already barely holding together.
"Since when does Jennifer Laurent have an elder sister?" I whisper.
Lucas is already at the keyboard, pulling files. Years of data — centuries of accumulated intelligence, the foundation of the Schweitzer information empire. Names, lineages, marriages, births, deaths, scandals, secrets. Every powerful family in the Western world cross-referenced and catalogued.
Nothing.
No elder sister. No prior marriage for Ludwig. No record of any woman connected to the Laurent patriarch before Jennifer.
An entire person — erased. As if she never existed.
"If we have no data on this..." My throat is dry. "It means someone deliberately wiped her existence from every accessible record. Like she was never born."
Lucas's hands tremble over the keyboard. Even he — the man who watched me stab Rosie without flinching — is shaken by this.
I turn back to the monitor. Adrien's face. Clear resolution. High definition enough to see the exact moment his eyes go from shock to something worse — the hollow, vacant stare of a person whose operating system just crashed.
He whispers "what?" and the word barely makes a sound.
Ludwig grabs him. Jennifer screams. Staff panics.
And Adrien stands alone in the center of it all. Still. Empty. A man-shaped void.
A wave of nausea rises so fast I can't fight it. I cover my mouth, rush to the bathroom, and vomit into the sink. My eyes burn. The gagging echoes off the tiles. My body convulses with something that isn't illness — it's the physical manifestation of a worldview collapsing.
I flush. Grip the edges of the sink. My reflection stares back — pale, shaking, eyes red.
A choked whisper escapes my mouth: "No... you were supposed to be the perfect one. The chosen one. The son with the family and the warmth and the father who came for him. Why... why you..."
This is ridiculous. Why do I feel hurt? Why do I feel pity for a man I've hated for seventeen years?
Because of what this means.
There is a very real chance that Adrien's mother — his real mother, the woman he doesn't know exists — was killed. By Ludwig. By Jennifer. By someone who needed her erased so completely that even the Schweitzer network, with three hundred years of accumulated intelligence, has no record of her existence.
At least I know my mother. I have her memories. The smell of her cooking. The sound of her voice when she called me Sonnenschein. I was never deceived about who I lost — I lost her violently, publicly, and I carry that grief openly.
Adrien was robbed of something worse. He was robbed of the knowledge that there was anything to grieve at all.
And then the memory comes. The one I've buried deepest.
I was seven. Locked in a dark warehouse somewhere in a rainforest. Darkness was already familiar to me by that age — my father's house had taught me that much.
Then they brought in two more boys. One was nine — mismatched blue-green eyes, wide and shaking but trying not to show it. The other was seven like me — crying, terrified, clinging to his older brother.
The nine-year-old looked at me. I was sitting against the wall, silent, watching our captors the way I'd learned to watch my father — tracking movements, calculating threat, preparing for pain.
He reached his hand toward me.
Nobody had done that before. Not once. Not in seven years of life.
"Don't worry," he said. His voice shook, but his hand was steady. "I'll protect you. I'm older than you."
He pulled me against his chest next to his brother. Both arms around us. His heart hammered against my ear — fast, scared, nine years old and absolutely terrified. But he held us like his body was a wall and nothing on the other side could get through.
For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to be protected.
His father came. Took the younger brother first — Raphael, scooped against Ludwig's chest, kissed, held, carried away. Ludwig looked at us on the floor and said: "Give me some time. I'll come back."
The remaining captors found us within the hour. They dragged Adrien across the concrete. Hit him with an iron rod. His skin tore. Blood pooled beneath him.
I screamed. Crawled toward him. Cried the way I hadn't cried since my mother died — animal sounds, wailing, wrapping my small hands around his wounds like I could physically stop the bleeding.
He grinned at me. Bloody teeth. Twisted ankle. Both eyes swollen shut.
"Told you. I'm strong."
I wailed harder. Begged him not to die. Held his body against mine — a seven-year-old trying to keep a nine-year-old alive through sheer force of wanting it badly enough.
The next day, Ludwig came back. Lifted Adrien's limp body from the floor. And before Adrien lost consciousness, he mumbled through broken lips:
"Take him too, Papa. I was a strong boy."
He was asking his father to save me. The boy who had been beaten for twenty-four hours because his father chose his other son first — and his last conscious thought was making sure the seven-year-old next to him wasn't left behind.
Those seven days in that warehouse. I met my first friend. The first person who shared laughter with me. Who told me jokes I didn't understand and laughed when I didn't get them. Who pretended to be brave so I wouldn't have to be.
That nine-year-old boy was Adrien.
My soul brother. My biggest enemy.
A choking sound tears from my chest. I'm clutching the edge of the sink, tears streaming down my face, and I can't stop them. I don't try.
"Fuck — you weren't supposed to go through this, you bastard..."
I press my hand against my mouth. The sobs come in waves — ugly, raw, the kind of crying I haven't done since I was seven years old and a boy I'd just met held me against his chest and pretended the darkness wasn't there.
And for the first time in seventeen years, I don't pray for something bad to happen to Adrien Aurélien Laurent.
I pray that Ludwig wasn't involved in his real mother's death.
Because that pain — discovering that the father you've loved your entire life killed the mother you never knew — Adrien won't survive it. He loves that old man. Despite everything, despite the hierarchy, despite being left on the warehouse floor. He loves Ludwig with the blind, desperate devotion of a son who never stopped trying to earn what should have been given freely.
If that love turns out to be built on a grave — it will break him in a way that no amount of money or power or dynasty can repair.
I know. Because it broke me. But I never had been manipulated, deceived... My father's hatred toward me was open, my step mom's cruelty was obvious and my mother's death wasn't some history I didn't get to see.
Lucas finds me sitting on the bathroom floor. He says nothing. Sets a glass of water beside me and leans against the doorframe.
Eventually I stand. Walk back to the control room. Pull my wallet from my pocket.
Three pictures inside.
My mother. Gentle violet eyes, blonde hair framing her face, The smile I inherited. The woman who called me Sonnenschein before the world took her from me.
Lucas and Lucian on my twenty-second birthday. Cake smeared on my face. Lucian's arm around my neck. Lucas holding a sparkler like a weapon. The night I officially became patriarch after a bloodbath inside the Schweitzer family where everyone was desperate to kill me but never succeed— celebrated by the only two people who gave a damn whether I lived or died.
Beatrice. A photo I took from that night when I first saw her. My salvation, the only woman I have ever loved and will ever love. Her eyes sparkling with her usual spark that makes the world surrounding her feel dim.
And behind my mother's picture — tucked so deep I have to peel the leather apart to reach it — an old photograph. Worn at the edges. Faded.
Me and Adrien.
Sixteen and eighteen. Before the blood. Before the road. Before he called me a monster and I decided to become one.
We're standing somewhere green, the backyard of the secret treehouse we made out of sight of people to drink and smoke, arm is around my shoulder. I'm almost smiling. He's fully grinning..
Two boys who didn't know what was coming.
I hold the photograph for a long time.
Then I put it back. Behind my mother's picture. Where it's always been.
Lucas watches from the doorway. He doesn't ask questions. He knows me well enough to understand that some things don't need words.
I look at the monitor. The Laurent estate feed. Then at Beatrice's apartment — lights off, sleeping, safe.
Then at the fireplace, where the boots and gloves and knife have been reduced to ash.
I stabbed Adrien's sister tonight. And I'm crying over a photograph of us at sixteen.
This is what I am. A man who kneels with soup and stabs in the same night. Who surveys the woman he loves through hidden cameras and weeps over the friend he lost. Who will burn anything that threatens Beatrice and protect the secret of the man he's been trying to destroy for seventeen years.
Every piece of me contradicts every other piece.
And I'm too tired tonight to pretend otherwise.
I delete the Laurent estate footage from the server. Permanently. Irrecoverably.
Not because I'm noble. Not because I've forgiven Adrien.
Because a nine-year-old boy with bloody teeth and mismatched eyes once said "take him too, Papa" — and I will carry the debt of those four words for the rest of my life.
" Search through everything. I need all information about Adrien's real mother within 7 hours." I say cooly, almost robotic...
And for the first time in my life.. I wish to be wrong.