Forty-Seven Files

Solveig Ravenscroft found her husband in the study an hour later, the housekeeper's son gone, the ledger still open on the desk.

"You let him humiliate our son in front of three hundred people," she said. "In front of cameras."

"Percival humiliated himself," Gideon said. "I only stopped him before he did more damage."

"By naming that boy successor? Gideon, he's the housekeeper's son."

"He's the reason this company survived the last decade. I have documents to prove every claim, Solveig. Would you like to see them?"

She didn't answer that. She didn't have to.

Down the hall, Percy sat alone in his old bedroom, the one that still had a shelf of trophies from schools he'd barely finished. His phone had ninety-one unread messages. He didn't open any of them.

He opened his laptop instead.

The trust amendment his father had shown Emeric — Percy had seen the file open on the study monitor through the door, just for a second, just long enough to read the header. *Successor designate.*

Eleven years. His father had been planning this for eleven years, since Percy was still passing his classes, still the golden child, still the one everyone clapped for.

He found the shared server easily enough — he still had administrator access, nobody had thought to revoke it, not yet.

He found the folder Thea had found first. Every draft. Every falsified report with Emeric's handwriting underneath Percy's polished version.

He could delete it. All of it. Every trace that Emeric had ever fixed a single one of his mistakes, leaving only the forged signatures — leaving Emeric holding all of it alone, exactly the way Percy had asked him to at the press conference and exactly the way Emeric had refused.

His cursor hovered over *delete all*.

Downstairs, his mother's voice carried up through the old pipes, arguing with his father, and underneath it, fainter, he thought he heard someone crying — Odalys, maybe, in the kitchen, or maybe it was just the house settling the way it always did at night.

Percy's finger came down on the mouse.

The screen flashed: *47 files deleted.*