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Chapter 27: The Serpent's Offer, Revisited
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2025-12-15 19:29:14
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Plaything in one's palm Chapter 68
The unspoken truce solidified after Lynn’s report. The air in the penthouse lost its brittle, hostile edge, replaced by a tense, pragmatic calm. It was not friendship. It was not forgiveness. It was an alliance of necessity, forged in the crucible of a shared, looming threat. Marcus was the enemy, and survival was the only objective.A few days after the incident with the message, Caius summoned Lynn to the study again. This time, it was not for a confession or a confrontation. It was for a briefing.Lynn entered the room, finding Caius standing by the large interactive screen mounted on the wall. The screen was no longer displaying financial charts. It showed a complex, branching diagram of what looked like corporate structures and communication networks.“Sit,” Caius said, his tone clipped and businesslike, without looking away from the screen. He gestured to the same chair Lynn had occupied during their last, devastating conversation.Lynn sat, his posture stiff. He felt like a stu
Plaything in one's palm Chapter 67
The silent aftermath of the studio encounter settled over the penthouse like a fragile truce. The raw, screaming paintings remained in the studio, an unspoken testament to the chasm that had been bridged not by words, but by a shared, terrible understanding. Lynn no longer felt like a ghost haunting the periphery; he was a presence, a quiet storm contained within the walls. The fear was still there, a constant hum beneath his skin, but it was now tempered by a new, grim clarity.He had seen the enemy, and it wasn't just the man in the study. It was the vast, impersonal machine of family legacy and corporate greed that had chewed up his father and Lucas and was now trying to consume him. Caius was a part of that machine, perhaps its chief operator, but he was also, in his own twisted way, a prisoner of it. This realization didn't bring forgiveness, but it forged a strange, precarious alliance of survival.A week after the confrontation, the burner phone vibrated.Lynn was in the living
Plaything in one's palm Chapter 66
The days that followed the confrontation in the study were a blur of hollowed-out silence. The penthouse felt different. The locks on Lynn’s door were gone. The invisible barriers that had confined him to his room and the studio had vanished. He was free to roam the gilded cage, but the freedom felt meaningless. The world outside the windows was the same, but the man inside was irrevocably changed.He avoided Caius. Their paths didn't cross. Meals appeared in the kitchen, left by an unseen hand. The penthouse was a ship with two ghosts haunting its separate ends. Lynn spent his time in the studio, not because it was a sanctuary, but because it was the only place that made sense. The blank canvases were the only things that didn't hold a lie.For the first two days, he didn't paint. He just sat, staring at the walls, the ghost of his father’s story, of Lucas’s story, playing on a loop in his mind. The idealistic partnership, the brilliant technology, the ruthless father, the obedient s
Plaything in one's palm Chapter 65
The storm of grief and rage passed, leaving behind a landscape of utter desolation. Lynn sat on the cold marble floor, his back against the solid wood of the desk, his body hollowed out. The tears had stopped, leaving his face stiff and salty. The sobs had subsided, replaced by a deep, shuddering exhaustion that seeped into his bones. He felt like a vessel that had been filled to the brim with agony and then violently emptied, leaving nothing but a fragile shell.He was aware of Caius moving on the other side of the desk, the soft sounds of his presence a counterpoint to the deafening silence in Lynn’s own head. The confession, the revelation of his own insignificance in the grand, bloody scheme of the Evans family, had crushed him. He was not an avenger. He was a tool. A conveniently placed piece of leverage. The hatred he had nurtured for Caius felt pointless now, a flame that had been doused by the cold water of a much larger, more terrifying truth.He heard the quiet clink of crys
Plaything in one's palm Chapter 64
The silence in the study was no longer empty; it was thick with the ghosts of two dead men and the confession that had summoned them. Lynn sat motionless, the image of his father’s systematic destruction playing out behind his eyes with horrifying clarity. He saw the legal documents, the severed loans, the abandoned labs, the final, humiliating offer. He saw the fear in his father’s eyes, a fear he now understood was not just of failure, but of murder.The controlled, analytical tone Caius had used to describe the execution made it worse. It was a recitation of corporate strategy, a clinical dissection of a murder by a thousand cuts. The rage that had been simmering in Lynn’s chest, banked by fear and confusion, erupted.It started as a tremor in his hands, then a violent shudder that wracked his entire frame. The tears came not as a trickle, but as a flood, hot and silent at first, then accompanied by ragged, choking sobs that tore from his throat. He wasn't crying from sadness; he w
Plaything in one's palm Chapter 63
The name Lucas hung in the study like a ghost, and the story that followed painted a picture of a tragedy so profound it seemed to suck the air from the room. Lynn sat frozen in his chair, the polished wood feeling like a block of ice beneath him. His father, the idealist, and Lucas Evans, the dreamer, caught in a web of corporate greed and familial tyranny. It was a story he had never imagined, a betrayal that went far deeper than a simple hostile takeover.Caius’s gaze was distant, fixed on some point in the past, his face a mask of grim remembrance. The controlled CEO was gone, replaced by a man recounting a sin that had shaped his life.“After Lucas…” Caius paused, the name catching in his throat. He cleared it, the sound harsh in the silence. “After his death, there was no room for sentiment. My father was… unequivocal. The project was a cancer. Your father was the last remaining cell. He had to be excised. Completely.”He finally looked at Lynn, his eyes devoid of their earlier
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