Chapter 5: The Silent Shadow

Iridessa’s POV

The glass walls of my office in Geneva looked out over the lake, but I barely glanced at the view as I finished reviewing the final audit for the Wilder Tech acquisition, because for five years I had worked toward this specific moment with a focus that left no room for sentiment. I had discovered the pregnancy only weeks after arriving in Switzerland, and while the shock of having twins nearly broke me at first, Ares and Aurora became the reason I rebuilt myself into someone who could never be stepped on again. Cassian walked into the room without knocking, his footsteps heavy on the plush carpet as he dropped a leather-bound folder onto my desk and leaned against the edge of the mahogany surface.

​"The jet is fueled and ready, and the legal team in the city says the Wilders have already arrived at the neutral boardroom, though they still think they’re meeting a male executive from the Sterling Group," Cassian said, his eyes scanning my face for any sign of hesitation, but I simply closed my laptop and stood up, smoothing the front of my tailored grey suit. "Ares asked why you’re wearing your 'scary' watch today, and Aurora wanted to know if you’re coming home in time for their coding lesson tonight, so I told them you’re just going to sign a few papers and close a very old door."

​"Tell them I’ll be back before they go to bed, and make sure the security detail doesn't let them leave the estate grounds while I'm gone, because I don't want a single person in that city knowing they exist until I've finished what I started," I replied, grabbing my phone and heading toward the door while Cassian followed close behind.

​The flight back was shorter than I remembered, or perhaps I was just too busy preparing the foreclosure documents to notice the time passing, and when the car pulled up to the glass-fronted building where the meeting was being held, I felt a strange sense of calm. I walked through the lobby with a group of four attorneys trailing me, and as we reached the top floor, I could hear the muffled sounds of an argument coming from inside the boardroom.

​"I am telling you, there has to be a mistake in the interest calculation, because my son built this company from nothing and we are not just going to hand over the keys to the mansion because of a few bad quarters," Penelope’s voice shrilled through the door, and I heard Maya chime in with a whine that sounded exactly like it did five years ago, saying, "And where is this representative? We’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes and it’s disrespectful to keep us waiting when our future is on the line."

​I signaled for my lead lawyer to open the door, and the room fell into a sudden, suffocating silence as I walked in, my heels clicking sharply against the tile floor. Slade was sitting at the head of the table, his hair thinner and his face etched with deep lines of stress that made him look ten years older than the last time I saw him, and Malani was tucked into a chair behind him, looking terrified as she clutched a designer bag that was clearly an older model.

​"Iridessa?" Slade gasped, his voice cracking as he stood up so abruptly that his chair screeched against the floor, and his eyes searched my face as if he were looking for the girl who used to cook his breakfast and wash his clothes. "What are you doing here? Is this some kind of joke, or are you working as a secretary for the Sterling Group now?"

​I didn't answer him immediately, instead I walked to the opposite end of the table and sat down in the high-backed executive chair, placing my phone face-down on the table and sliding the foreclosure papers across the polished wood toward him. "I am the Principal Executive of the Sterling Group’s Tech Division, Slade, and I am the one who has spent the last five years buying every single debt your family has managed to accumulate while trying to stay relevant," I said, my voice cold and flat as I watched Penelope’s face turn a ghostly shade of white.

​"That’s impossible, you were just a linguistics student with no money, so there is no way you could be running a conglomerate like this unless you used that man from the limousine to buy your way in," Maya spat, her face reddening with anger as she pointed a finger at me, but I didn't even blink.

​"The man in the limousine is my brother, Cassian Sterling, and the only reason you were allowed to live in that house for the last three years is because I wanted to see how much deeper you could dig your own grave," I countered, looking at Slade as he frantically flipped through the documents, his hands shaking so much that he nearly tore the pages. "I believe you owe me three years of back pay for the coding work I did for Wilder Tech, Slade, along with the interest on the loans I’m foreclosing on today, and since you can't pay the cash, I'll be taking the company and the house instead."

​"Iridessa, please, we can talk about this, I know I made mistakes and I shouldn't have believed the things I heard, but we were a family once," Slade pleaded, his arrogance finally crumbling as he realized he was about to lose everything, but I just leaned back and looked at the clock on the wall.

​"We were never a family, Slade, I was a servant you used to build your dreams, and the moment you struck me was the moment you forfeited any right to speak to me about the past," I said, my phone buzzing on the table with an incoming video call from the kids.

​I reached out to silence the alert, but as I moved my hand, the screen lit up for a few seconds, displaying the lock screen photo of Ares and Aurora sitting together on the grass in Geneva. Slade’s eyes drifted down to the phone, and I saw the exact moment the air left his lungs because Ares was leaning his head to the side in a way that Slade did every single day, and the boy’s facial structure was an identical match to the childhood portraits that still hung in the Wilder mansion’s hallway.

​Slade looked from the phone to me, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find the words to ask the question that was clearly burning in his mind, but I just grabbed the phone and stood up, signaling for my lawyers to wrap up the paperwork. "You have twenty-four hours to vacate the property, and if I see a single piece of furniture missing from the inventory list, I will file criminal charges," I stated, turning toward the door and leaving him standing there,