Chapter Twenty-Two: The Silence of the Second Son

You can live in a palace and still feel like you’re being hunted.

The halls of Blackwood Estate echoed louder after that painting arrived. The servants whispered when they thought I wasn’t listening. Doors creaked closed just a little faster. Security doubled, but I didn’t feel safer.

I felt like prey.

Lucien’s silence said more than his words ever could. He hadn’t spoken to me since the necklace. Since I saw the initials carved into the clasp like a secret hiding in plain sight. R.B.

Reagan Blackwood’s signature on my throat.

I kept thinking about my mother wearing it. Was it a gift or a threat? A trophy? A promise?

My thoughts felt like cracked mirrors—distorted, dangerous, never quite true.

I hadn’t seen Lucien in thirty hours.

Not since the hallway. Not since the way he looked at me like I’d betrayed him, even though I didn’t understand how. I’d worn a necklace given in good faith. But maybe faith had no place in a house built by deception.

That morning, I woke to find my reflection smeared across the mirror.

Lipstick. Smudged across the glass like blood.

SILENCE IS A KINDNESS.

No initials. No fingerprints.

Just the taste of fear, cold and metallic, on my tongue.

Lucien finally emerged from the shadows that evening.

He didn’t say hello.

Didn’t ask if I’d slept or eaten or breathed in the last day and a half.

He just looked at me—really looked at me—and said, “I know where he is.”

I blinked. “What?”

Reagan.

Lucien stepped closer, his eyes fever-bright. “He has a safe house in Montauk. Coastal surveillance picked up a figure matching his height and gait. The security team cross-referenced it with footage from our old summer estate. He’s there.”

I should’ve felt relief. Or triumph.

But all I felt was a tightening in my chest.

“Then what are you waiting for?” I asked.

Lucien’s expression was ice. “I’m not waiting. I’m preparing.”

He turned, heading for the war room again—his version of a chapel. Where battles were waged in contracts and bloodlines.

I followed.

Not because I was ready to fight.

But because I needed answers.

And Reagan had made me the battlefield.

The walls of the war room were covered with maps. Family trees. Estate blueprints. There was a full whiteboard dedicated to Possible Motivations for Reagan Blackwood.

Beneath it were scrawled words like:

Revenge.

Disinheritance.

Margot Sinclair?

I stopped cold at my mother’s name.

Lucien didn’t look up. “I told them not to include her. But they think she’s the key.”

“Maybe she is.”

He turned. “Do you believe she knew what she was doing? Wearing his necklace? Carrying his child?”

I flinched. “You think he’s my father?”

“No,” he said instantly. “No, Ivy. That part I believe. You’re Victor’s. The DNA confirms it. But Reagan… he might’ve claimed her before Victor ever did.”

The air left my lungs.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying this might not be about me.”

His voice was quieter now. “It might be about you. About finishing what he started.”

That night, Lucien didn’t go to Montauk.

He stayed.

With me.

In silence.

We lay in the same bed like strangers sharing a secret neither of us asked for.

I stared at the ceiling while he stared at the shadows crawling up the wall.

“He’s making me choose,” Lucien said at last.

“Between what?”

“Between protecting my legacy… and protecting you.”

The sheets felt too heavy.

I turned to him. “I don’t need protection. I need the truth.”

He looked at me like that was the cruelest thing I could’ve asked.

“I watched him drag my mother by the arm across this hallway when I was eight. I watched her sob into the sink while my father poured whiskey and whispered, ‘This is the cost of inheritance.’ I learned young, Ivy. This family doesn’t forgive. It devours.”

I reached for his hand.

“Then let’s stop pretending it’s a family.”

The next morning, a package arrived addressed to The Second Son.

Inside was a cassette tape.

Lucien had it digitized and played through the library’s sound system.

At first, just static.

Then—two voices.

One I didn’t recognize. A woman. My mother?

And another.

Smooth. Smoky.

“You think he’ll protect you, Margot?”

Her voice cracked.

“You promised you’d leave him alone.”

“Oh, I will. But I didn’t say anything about your child.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

Lucien hit pause.

I stared at the speaker like it had slapped me.

“That was him,” I whispered.

Lucien nodded. “He threatened her. Before she disappeared.”

“And you think—what? That he killed her?”

Lucien’s jaw flexed. “Or made her disappear.”

My hands curled into fists.

This wasn’t about boardrooms anymore.

This was about blood.

Mine. Hers.

Ours.

That night, I found Lucien at the pool, fully dressed, staring into the still water.

He didn’t hear me come in.

“I can’t win this, Ivy.”

I stepped beside him. “Then don’t try to win. Try to survive.”

He laughed bitterly. “Do you know what Reagan always said? That silence was the weapon of the privileged. That we bury our sins under marble and call it elegance.”

“Then let’s stop being elegant.”

He looked at me, something wild flickering in his eyes.

“We have to go to Montauk,” I said.

“No.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “It’s a trap.”

“Of course it is. But you said yourself—he’s making this personal.”

Lucien turned to me, and for a second I didn’t see the billionaire. I saw the boy who watched his world fall apart one scream at a time.

“If we go there, we don’t come back the same.”

I took his hand. “We already aren’t.”

We left before sunrise.

No convoy. No announcement.

Just us.

I wore the necklace again—not as a symbol, but as a dare.

Lucien drove.

No music. Just tension.

The road to Montauk was lined with dying trees. The ocean loomed like an open mouth.

By noon, we reached the estate.

It had been abandoned for years. Ivy strangled the fences. Windows shattered. The gate still bore the Blackwood crest, half burned.

“This is where you summered?” I asked.

Lucien didn’t smile. “This is where I buried pieces of myself.”

Inside, dust and memory clung to every surface.

A child’s piano. A broken lamp. A framed photo of a woman with Lucien’s eyes.

And in the center of the foyer:

A table.

And on it—a single envelope.

Lucien picked it up. His hands didn’t shake.

He opened it.

Read the letter.

Then slowly turned it toward me.

One line.

“He’s not your enemy. She is.”

Lucien looked up. “What the hell does that mean?”

I stared at the words.

And whispered, “It means he’s not trying to kill you.”

Lucien’s breath hitched.

“He’s trying to turn you against me.”