Chapter 10 - The Price of Truth
The silence in the glass-walled pavilion was heavier than any physical blow.
"It's a lie," I whispered, my voice trembling as the words tore through my throat. "My mother spent her entire life terrified of your family. She raised me in a cramped, freezing apartment eating canned soup while she worked three jobs. She didn't have eighty million dollars. She didn't take hush money. She was a victim!"
"Was she?" Vance asked smoothly, leaning back into his posture of complete, unshakeable control. He tapped a single finger against the sealed manila envelope on the table. "Open it, Ms. Bennett. Check the signature on page four. Certified by a Cook County judge twenty-eight years ago—the exact same judge who sealed your birth records."
I couldn't move my hands. They felt glued to the wood, heavy as lead.
Beside me, Dominic slowly reached out. His fingers, usually so steady, brushed against the corner of the envelope. He pulled it toward himself with agonizing slowness, broke the red wax seal, and pulled out a single sheet of stiff, yellowed legal paper.
His dark eyes scanned the lines of text. I watched his face—the hard, granite mask he wore against the world—fracture and crumble piece by piece until there was nothing left behind his eyes except a vast, hollow emptiness.
"Dominic..." I breathed, my heart breaking as I reached for his sleeve. "Look at me. That was twenty-eight years ago. I didn't know. I swear to God I didn't know."
Dominic didn't pull away, but his gaze remained locked on the paper in his hand.
"The signature," Dominic said, his voice barely audible over the hum of the distant heating vents, "is Sarah Sterling’s. Verified by bank stamp and notary."
Across the table, Richard Vance smiled—a cold, triumphant smirk of a man who had just won the game without having to throw a single punch.
"You see, Dominic?" Vance said softly, straightening his jacket. "There was never a grand corporate conspiracy against your family. There was just a messy family dispute, a desperate woman who sold out her fiancé to save her own skin, and a daughter who came back twenty-eight years later trying to finish the collection."
Vance turned his gaze back to me, his eyes narrowing into cold slits.
"And now that you're here, Ms. Bennett, the board will vote to freeze all asset transfers at eight o'clock this morning. You and your little girl can go back to your West Side apartment with nothing—just like your mother started."
He turned on his heel, signaling his two security guards, and walked toward the exit without looking back. The glass doors parted, swallowed him into the gray morning light, and closed behind him with a soft, final thud.
Left alone in the center of the sprawling glass pavilion, the silence between Dominic and me felt insurmountable.
I pulled my hand back from his sleeve, my chest burning with a suffocating mix of grief, humiliation, and fierce, unyielding anger. I reached down, grabbed my bag, and stood up from the chair.
"If you want me to leave, I'll go," I said, my voice cracking despite every effort to keep it steady. "I'll pack Sophie's things, I'll take Mr. Buttons, and we'll disappear back to the West Side before your board meeting starts. You won't ever have to look at my face or remember my mother's mistakes again."
I turned toward the exit, my legs shaking so badly I could barely walk.
Before I had taken two steps, a heavy hand caught my wrist.
It wasn't a tight, threatening grip. It was warm, firm, and impossible to break.
I stopped, looking back over my shoulder.
Dominic was still sitting at the table, but he had finally lowered the legal paper. His dark eyes weren't looking at the signature anymore. They were looking straight at me—filled with a complex, shattering depth that defied every rule of the empire he commanded.
"My brother died eleven years ago believing he was betrayed by the only woman he ever loved," Dominic said, his voice raw and broken, carrying the weight of a decade of ghosts. "And you spent twenty-eight years believing your mother abandoned you to a life of poverty for no reason at all."
He slowly stood up, closing the distance between us until he was standing right in front of me, his tall frame shielding me from the cold gray light outside.
"Richard Vance thinks he won because he exposed a lie from the past," Dominic whispered, his thumb gently brushing a stray tear from my cheek that I hadn't even realized had fallen. "He doesn't understand the one thing my family has never learned."
I looked up into his dark, exhausted eyes, my breath catching in my throat.
"What's that?" I whispered.
"We don't care about the sins of our parents," Dominic said, his gaze locking onto mine with an unyielding, fierce intensity. "We only care about what we do next."
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He didn't let go of my wrist. Instead, he reached down, took the heavy leather folder of journals from my other hand, and laced his fingers securely through mine.
"Come on," Dominic said softly, his jaw set with a hard, dangerous resolve. "Let's go tell the board."
