45. NINEAH
NINEAH
IF I WEREN’T so thrown by the fact that I was currently sitting in the same building at the same time as not one, but two other people I shared blood with, I might’ve laughed. “I came to plead a truce.”
Ye-Jun “Joseph” Omari Lin, billionaire and heir to NuCom, the largest e-commerce brand in Germany and the UK, and my biological half-brother, clasped his hands together, considering me with paternal concern. “A truce.”
I nodded. “I know it was you who tried to have to me disappeared and I’m offering a trade. Leave me and my family alone and I’ll follow suit. But come after me again and I promise you, I will use every tactical and professional advantage at my disposal to make you wish you never knew me.”
My brother regarded me with his full attention, but I’d been around the wealthy class enough to know this conversation was only happening because he was allowing it.
However, I hadn’t come here for justice, I came to sever the binds this family held over my life and I wasn’t leaving without my freedom.
“Disappeared,” he murmured. “How do you figure that?”
“I’m not naive,” I said, ignoring him. “I can’t pursue legal justice against you.
I can’t seek revenge because even if I could harm you, I’m not interested in the blowback that would bring on Gavrielle and your mother.
But what I can do, is make life incredibly inconvenient for you in ways your pedestrian imagination could only fathom. ”
“What is your proposal?” he asked without missing a beat. It wasn’t lost on me that he didn’t rush to deny the accusation.
“Seven years ago, someone who went by the alias Claudius sent me a blood DNA sample that belonged to Gavrielle and attempted to blackmail me into committing treason against my home government. My belief is that they planned to betray me. Instead, six US Marines were killed several months later as a result of my non-compliance.” I paused to search for familiarity or recognition, but Joseph gave me nothing.
“I know you know that I found her. Sometime around the last couple of years or so, she’d have told you about her first boat commission as an apprentice designer.
About the woman with the Black and Korean heritage and such a striking resemblance to the both of you.
At first, I suspected that you’d targeted me for that sole offense, but that was before I found a marina close to the shop your sister had been working out of, where I had an interesting conversation with the owner who was able to verify that I’d visited several times in the two years leading up to my attack.
” Zajre and I had made the eight hour trip to New Castle, where according to the manager on duty, I’d rented port twenty for the better part of thirteen months.
“He also explained to me that not long after my last visit, they’d suffered a devastating fire, destroying several watercraft, including an older fishing boat named La Batarde docked in that very port.
Coincidentally, I haven’t been able to locate anything of mine since. Monitors, CPUs, hard drives—nothing.”
“And you believe I am responsible. Do I have that right, Mrs. Lawton?”
I didn’t stiffen at his use of my married name, nor miss that he refused to claim me as blood.
Instead, I told him exactly why I was here, standing in his private suite, at a party I hadn’t been invited to.
“Your father passed only three years ago and you’re still finding your footing as his successor.
A bastard child tainting the family brand and driving a wedge through your already unstable business relationships would’ve been a regular Tuesday for the kind of PR team you keep on retainer, but evidence of your involvement in a war crime carried out against an allied nation?
Well, that’s the type of shit you ensure never sees the light of day at any cost.”
Joseph considered this for a beat, then to my surprise, his mouth lifted in a sardonic curve and he shook his head with a low chuckle.
“You think this is funny?” I demanded.
“Have you read it?” he asked. “Hamlet?”
I stared at a deceased billionaire’s heir in disbelief, but he just smiled tiredly.
“You should. It’s quite the tale of a cunning master manipulator with ambitions above his rank, who managed to fool those around him with a stutter and a limp.
Unassuming, Claudius used his advantage to poison his brother for the throne.
” He sat up in his chair. “If I were you, I would think about your question, then ask yourself who stands the most to gain with you out of the way, being that you are by all accounts and technicalities, the rightful second heir and by your own admission, a greater threat to our family than any scandal involving my father’s well-documented weakness for cheating on my mother. A hint—it isn’t me.”
My heart dropped into my stomach.
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you.”
“Unfortunately, what you believe is of no consequence as it pertains to the truth.” Joseph rose from his seat and rounded the bar.
Grabbing a large green bottle from the glass door in the wall, he made a show of waving it in my line of sight before he opened it and poured two glasses.
“There’s a reason I haven’t eaten or drank anything I haven’t opened or prepared with my own two hands in three years. ”
I shook my head. “That makes no sense. She’d have been fourteen at the time.”
“And how old were you when you got picked up by the feds?” Returning to his chair, he set a glass of the rice liquor down in front of me. “You have no idea the strife you’ve caused my family just by existing.”
I swallowed. “I don’t understand.”
Joseph swallowed the liquor. Pausing for a beat, he stared at the tumbler.
“I am my father’s son, but Gavrielle is our mother’s daughter.
Our parents came from nothing, both first generation immigrants who met at Oxford.
They started the company together and grew it into what it is today, but what is not well known is that my father is CEO and founder in name and face only.
Our mother Nonaa had all of the ambition and eventually, it strained their relationship.
He thought she was too aggressive. She thought he was weak.
They were both right.” A look of contempt and the distant tinge of grief passed through his dark stare.
“The more successful NuCom became, the more they hated one another. But my father’s mistake was assuming that she wasn’t always twenty steps ahead.
” He paused. “He loved your mother. She was Nonaa’s older sister and my aunt.
When we lived in London, she’d take me sight-seeing or we’d hop on the train to France for a weekend, but out of the blue, the visits stopped and I never saw her again.
It wasn’t until my thirtieth birthday that my father told me the truth about the affair.
About you. He’d been sick for some time at that point and was in remission, but after Sanai’s passing, he became paranoid.
He’d seen the way our mother had started poisoning Gavri against him, against me, and he feared a time would come when he’d no longer be able to protect you.
I have no idea how Gavri found out about you, but our mother has spies everywhere. Even in my own damn security detail.”
She found out because of me…
Like gears fitting inside a locking mechanism, everything locked into place.
The obsessive search I’d conducted all these years, trying to find my biological parents or any living family, my naive desperation, all of it had placed me in the sights of someone who had viewed me, not as family, but a threat.
And that letter… I'd assumed it was a gesture waxing promise and regret, but I realized now it was a line I’d tossed into deep waters, hoping to draw out not a sister, but a war criminal who’d killed six US Marines and had nearly killed my husband.
Lifting the tall shot glass, I poured the liquor down my throat to keep myself from shouting.
I wanted to call him a liar. Run down stairs and shake the young woman whose twenty-first birthday was today and demand she tell me that this billionaire playboy was only trying to manipulate me, but deep in my bones, I knew that wasn’t true.
Joseph was too tired for his age. Too aggrieved.
And unlike me, had resigned himself to his reality.
If I was considered abandoned and alone, Joseph was the other side of my fucked up coin.
The man in front of me that many probably envied or regarded as untouchable was quietly suffering in an isolation of our father’s making.
All of them were, I realized.
Gavrielle. Her mother. Even my father, who’d convinced himself he was so helpless in the face of the very problems he created—and whose first inclination was to create new ones—had broken one family and abandoned another.
And all of these people who had the privilege of self-pity and passing the bowl of accountability, never having to take their share, hadn’t even had to answer for my mother. For me.
“Where is she?” I demanded. “Where is my mother?”
Joseph shrugged. “All I know is what my father told me. That she was found in Korea without you and claimed to have terminated the pregnancy. Several weeks later, she passed away due to injuries sustained in a tragic bus accident that killed several people. As far as I know, there was no evidence of foul play and I do not believe my family was involved.”
She never abandoned me.
She’d tried to protect me.
I swallowed. “Foul play.”
“My sister may not have your intellect or patience, but at the end of the day, she is still a product of this legacy, of your aunt, her mother,” Joseph said, frowning. “Believe me. If she wanted you dead, you would not be standing here.”
CLUTCHING my gown, I slipped through the kitchen, disappearing through the boutique hotel’s back exit the way Joseph had instructed me to take.
My driver held my door open and I slid inside.
Pulling the burner out of my clutch, I dialed the only number I knew by heart, but it rang twice before going straight to voicemail.
Shoving the phone back into my clutch, I swallowed the emotion before it came without my permission.
“Could you put up the partition please?” I asked the driver.
He pressed a button until a tinted sheet of glass separated us and I covered a scream with my hand.