Chapter 10 - The Unfinished Estate
The document on my tablet screen wasn't a corporate filing or a financial ledger. It was a certified deed transfer notification from the county land registry office across town.
I sat forward, my fingers scrolling down through the dense legal description of a property I hadn't visited since my father passed away: the old Greystone Manor on the northern cliffs overlooking the bay.
For three years, the estate had been tied up in an obscure probate dispute involving a forgotten secondary trust—a trust my father had established decades ago, long before Prescott Technologies was even a concept, naming me as the sole beneficiary under my maiden name. According to the time-stamped registry alert, the probate hold had officially cleared at noon today.
And more importantly, the automated utility and maintenance logs showed that someone had accessed the main gatehouse yesterday afternoon.
Before I could call Daniel to check the property management logs, my phone chimed again. This time, it was a direct text message from an unknown local number attached to a single photograph.
The photo showed the grand iron-studded front doors of Greystone Manor, cracked slightly open, with a familiar leather briefcase resting on the stone steps outside.
My breath caught. It wasn't Aaron's briefcase, and it wasn't Marcus Vance's. It was my father's old personal briefcase—the one he had kept locked in his private study, containing every foundational document, personal journal, and unrecorded business ledger from the early days of our family’s holdings.
A second message followed immediately from the same number: Your father left something inside the study that Aaron’s family tried to erase twenty years ago. If you want to know why Prescott Technologies really survived its first year, come alone.
May you like
I stared at the screen, the quiet victory of the corporate restructuring suddenly thrown into an entirely new, unpredictable light. The battle for the tech company was over, but the deeper history of my family's wealth—and the real reason Aaron’s mother had fought so desperately to control our lives—was just waiting to be uncovered.
I closed the tablet, grabbed my coat from the back of the chair, and walked toward the private elevator.
