Chapter 4

Sensing the System's sudden silence, Anthony let out a soundless laugh but didn't answer its question.

It wasn't that he had no desires at all. It was just that what he wanted was different from what most people wanted.

After his father had been thrown in prison for murder, and after he'd witnessed the hellish aftermath with his own eyes, a boulder had settled over his chest and never left.

It was a heavy, heavy weight, pressing down until he could barely breathe.

It wasn't some abstract feeling, either. To him, it was something real, something tangible—a physical presence that tormented him constantly, that jolted him wide awake in the dead of night, over and over.

Years later, Anthony had come to vaguely understand that the boulder crushing his chest had a name: guilt.

Guilt, for being the son of a murderer.

Anthony's greatest wish was to finally shift that boulder off his chest—the one that had sat there for all these years.

To make that wish come true, he had to die.

On top of everything else, between the years of what he'd been through, the car accident, and the lasting effects of his Emotional Deficiency Disorder, Anthony had long since stopped allowing himself to want much of anything.

There had been a time when Anthony had people he cared about, when he'd dreamed about the future, when he'd entertained the kind of hopeful fantasies any teenager might have.

But in the end, none of it had ever amounted to anything he could actually hold on to.

Since then, he'd understood one simple truth: the more desire a person carried, the deeper the wound when that desire shattered.

Just then, a handful of faces surfaced in his memory. Before he could even make out their features, a sharp pain stabbed through the space between his brows.

There it was again.

Well, whatever. He'd already decided to let go of all of it—so why keep dwelling on these things?

Someone like him would only make anyone he got close to feel sick, wouldn't he?

Anthony shook his head and, ignoring the murmurs of admiration directed at the luxury car around him, walked briskly into the campus.

Starting today, he was officially a student at Ashford University.

...

Meanwhile, inside the Rolls-Royce parked at the school gate.

"Mom, do you think Anthony will come to register today?"

From the back seat, a voice spoke up quietly.

The one speaking was a young woman in her early twenties. Her makeup was flawless, her bearing elegant, her chestnut hair falling in soft waves. She wore a tailored women's business suit, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, and the whole picture came together as understated, cultured, and refined.

Sit her down behind an office desk, and she'd look every bit the part of a cool, formidable CEO.

Which, as it happened, was exactly what she was.

The woman's birth name was Naomi Seymour. Following a family-reunion scandal seven years earlier, and with the personal approval of the Sinclair family patriarch, Arthur Sinclair, she'd changed her name to Naomi Sinclair, formally entered the Sinclair family registry, and become one of them for good.

As one of the Sinclair heirs, the family had naturally handed her a number of businesses to manage.

Among them, of course, were a few struggling ventures—an underperforming hotel, a failing resort, a floundering entertainment company—the kind that came with an obvious, foregone conclusion. Bankruptcy for some, liquidated land for others.

The Sinclairs hadn't really been trying to compensate Naomi and her mother for the years of hardship they'd endured out there in the world so much as humor them—no one had actually expected a girl with zero business experience to make anything of these companies. It was meant to be practice, nothing more.

No one could have predicted that, three years later, everyone would be stunned speechless.

Not only had none of those businesses gone under—Naomi had taken a heavy hand to each of them, restructuring and reorganizing until they came roaring back to life, their combined value now more than a hundred times what it had been.

"Roaring back to life" didn't even begin to describe what Naomi had pulled off. She'd only just turned twenty-three—an age when most people were fresh out of undergrad, if that, still working on a graduate degree.

She'd risen through the business world like she had some kind of cheat code, a rapidly ascending star in the corporate scene.

As a result, her once-marginal standing within the Sinclair family had shot up considerably. These days, she was very much someone to be reckoned with. Even Arthur himself had praised her more than once and clearly held her in high regard.

Suitors lined up outside Ashford's gates for her, a line that stretched for miles down toward the riverside park.

And yet this composed, elegant young CEO currently wore an anxious, unsettled expression.

As if the "Anthony" she'd mentioned was someone who mattered a great deal to her.

Hearing this, the beautiful, middle-aged woman seated beside her felt her eyes well up instantly.

As Naomi's mother, Diane Sinclair had already passed forty, but the years since rejoining the Sinclair family had treated her well—she still looked like a woman in her thirties, with no visible signs of aging.

Only in her empty, lightless eyes could anyone see the weight of sorrow she carried, buried too deep to work through.

"Naomi, sweetheart... Mommy's suddenly so nervous, I don't know what to do," Diane said, her voice trembling. "It's been so many years. Do you think he still hates me?

"This is all my fault. If only, back then, I'd..."

She, the mother, sounded in that moment like a helpless child, and gripped her daughter's wrist tightly.

Hearing this, Naomi's expression darkened. She meant to offer some words of comfort, but when she thought about what her brother might have gone through all these years, the words caught in her throat and refused to come out.

Truthfully, over the years, it wasn't as though the thought of bringing her brother back into the Sinclair family hadn't crossed her mind.

Given everything she'd accomplished in business, and with how much Arthur favored her, the request wouldn't have been out of line.

Even though adding another heir to split the family fortune would stir up plenty of objections, Naomi had long since decided she'd give up her own entire share to her brother without taking a cent for herself.

That alone would have softened much of the resistance from the rest of the family.

But right when she'd been about to act on the plan, disaster struck.

Her biological father—that abusive piece of trash—had gotten into a drunken altercation one night, stabbed seven people in a rage, killing two of them, and had been sentenced to death, the sentence carried out immediately.

And just like that, Naomi became the daughter of a murderer.

She'd long since cut all ties with that man, but for the rivals who'd been salivating over a chance to tear off a piece of the Sinclair empire, this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Overnight, her companies' stock prices crashed, and the headlines filled with lurid, borderline-slanderous stories, all trying to paint her as public enemy number one.

She'd spent that whole period scrambling, doing everything in her power just to keep her life's work from going up in flames.

After that, her degenerate father, along with everything connected to him, became a subject the Sinclair family flatly refused to discuss.

Naomi's heart had gone cold at the thought. She could easily imagine that if she and her mother brought up bringing her brother into the family again, they'd face fierce resistance from everyone—and this time, not even Arthur would step in to help her.

Worse still, the family had assigned people to keep watch over her and her mother, forbidding any contact with the son of that piece of trash, even barring any covert assistance, for fear it might come to light.

After all, a family like the Sinclairs valued reputation and appearances above almost everything else.

If word ever got out that the Sinclairs had gone out of their way to bring the son of a murderer back into the fold, it would become the biggest joke in Bayport City's high society.

And so, Naomi had swallowed it down and endured.

Four full years had passed since then.

It was only today that her control over the Sinclair Group had finally reached a solid sixty percent—enough, finally, to give her the freedom to act as she pleased.

Only... after everything that had happened, was it too late?