“Camille,” Julian said, his voice dropping into a low, hypnotic register, fighting to keep her from throwing the box into the inferno. “Look at me. Look at your brother.”
“You’re not my brother!” she shrieked, tears spilling over her eyelids. “You’re the golden child! Arthur’s precious Julian! The genius! The visionary! What was I, Julian? What did Father ever leave me? A decorative seat on a charity board! An allowance like a child! You controlled every penny, every asset, every piece of real estate!”
“I protected you!” Julian shouted back, the emotion finally cracking his stoic facade. “I paid off the Russian syndicate in Macau when they threatened to cut off your fingers! I paid three million dollars to scrub your name from that offshore money-laundering indictment! I gave you everything you asked for!”
“You gave me scraps!” Camille spat, her face twisting into an ugly grimace of lifelong resentment. “Marcus Drake offered me fifty percent of Vance Logistics! Fifty percent, Julian! All I had to do was give him the internal routing manifests. But Clara… your self-righteous, perfect little Clara caught the discrepancy in the ledger.”
Julian took a slow half-step forward. “So you had her killed.”
Camille’s breath hitched. She looked down at the Blue Box in her arms, her hands trembling so hard the metal rattled. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that! I just wanted her to be scared! I wanted her to stay out of the corporate accounts! Bianca was supposed to just disable the brakes so Clara would get into a fender bender! We didn’t know it was going to rain! We didn’t know the truck was coming!”
“Liar!” Julian’s voice exploded with the fury of a thousand storms. “Bianca just confessed downstairs! You hired her! You knew Clara had copied the drive! You knew she had put the evidence in this very room!”
“She did!” Camille wailed, breaking down into hysterical sobs. “Clara knew everything! She wrote down every bank account, every wire transfer, every offshore shell company Drake used to buy me! She kept it all in this damn box! When Mother had her surgery, she found Clara’s journal in the study safe! Mother knew! She confronted me yesterday… she told me she was going to tell you tonight at the gala!”
Julian felt a profound, sickening nausea rise in his gut. His mother hadn’t just been attacked; she had endured weeks of terror, keeping the secret until she could ensure Chloe was safe, trying desperately to reach him before the trap sprung.
“Give me the box, Camille,” Julian whispered, extending an open hand. “Mother is alive. The Digifab is at the hospital right now. It’s over. Give me the box.”
Camille’s eyes darted between Julian’s outstretched hand and the roaring fire.
“If I give it to you… Drake will kill me,” she whispered, trembling. “And if Drake doesn’t kill me, I’ll spend the rest of my life in a federal penitentiary.”
“You will go to prison,” Julian said without a trace of mercy. “You will pay for Clara’s death, and you will pay for what you did to Mother. But you will live. That is the only mercy I have left for you.”
A dark, desperate madness flickered across Camille’s eyes. “No. I won’t go to a cage, Julian. If I burn… we all burn.”
With a sudden, violent heave, Camille hurled the heavy Blue Box toward the center of the roaring fireplace.
