Eleanor set down her glass.
Her face was calm.
Too calm.
“Soon,” she said. “I switched his heart medication three weeks ago. I’ve been crushing digoxin into his morning ginger smoothies. It looks like natural heart failure. One day, he’ll fall asleep in his chair and never wake up. Then we control the board. We own everything.”
Tony touched my shoulder, but I barely felt it.
For forty years, Eleanor had slept beside me. She had prayed beside me. She had held my hand through surgeries and smiled across breakfast tables.
And for the past month, she had been looking me in the eyes every morning while handing me poison.
Then came the final blow.
Harper leaned against the vanity and sighed.
“Preston is so gullible. He gets it from his father.”
Eleanor smiled thinly.
“Richard?” she scoffed. “No. Preston is not Richard’s son. He is Marcus’s.”
Reverend Marcus Thorne.
My closest friend.
My golf partner.
The man who baptized the boy I believed was my son.
The man who had eaten Sunday dinner in my home for thirty years and preached morality to the entire community.
A sound rose in my throat, raw and furious. I lunged toward the monitor, ready to destroy it, but Tony threw himself against me and held my arms.
“Richard, stop,” he hissed. “If you destroy this, you destroy your only proof. If you go home screaming, she’ll say the poison made you delusional. She’ll have doctors lock you away. And then she wins.”
He was right.
The businessman in me—the part that had built an empire from nothing—forced itself back into control.
I took a shaky breath.
“Can you copy this to an encrypted drive?” I asked.
Tony reached into his pocket and placed a black flash drive in my hand.
“Already done.”
I sat in my car outside the restaurant for a long time. Then I called my attorney, Ms. Sterling. She was not related to me, but she was the most ruthless lawyer I knew.
“Open a confidential file,” I said. “Freeze every offshore account. Prepare to lock down the properties and suspend access to the trust. And find me a private toxicologist. I need a discreet test for digoxin.”
“What timeline are we working with?” she asked.
“Short,” I said. “Because now I have to go home and drink poison.”
That night, the horror truly settled in.
Not in the restaurant basement.
