I walked to his side, my heart hammering against my ribs.
The wedding planner, now trembling visibly, hurried over, clutching a stack of seating charts to her chest like a shield. “I… I am so sorry, sir! There must have been a terrible misunderstanding about your seating—”
“There was no misunderstanding,” Grandfather said, his voice cutting through the air like a blade. “You simply mistook kindness for weakness.”
My father, Richard, recovered first. Because if there was one thing that always gave my father courage, it was sheer, desperate greed. He forced a booming, utterly fake laugh and strode forward, holding both hands open in a gesture of peace.
“Theo, come on now,” Richard chuckled, sweating visibly through his custom suit. “Let’s not be dramatic on Liam’s big day. Let’s go get you a proper drink.”
Theo. My father only ever used Grandfather’s first name when he was trying to extract money from him.
Grandfather’s gaze cut through him like shattered glass. “You already made it dramatic, Richard, when you allowed your wife to feed your father to the flies.”
A low murmur began to spread like wildfire through the crowd of elite guests. Olivia’s wealthy mother whispered frantically to a man beside her. A high-profile businessman from the front row suddenly stood up, staring very hard at my grandfather, then at the heavily armed security detail, and then back again.
Recognition moved through the affluent crowd like a jolt of electricity.
Of course. They knew the face. They knew the name.
Theodore Vance. Founder of Vance Aeronautics. The primary investor in global defense logistics, international medical transport, and half the commercial redevelopment projects along the eastern seaboard. The man whose companies employed tens of thousands, whose aggressive philanthropy funded entire hospital wings, whose interviews were so incredibly rare that people argued over his actual age on internet forums because no one could ever pin him down.
He had vanished from the public eye a decade ago after my grandmother died. He let the corporate world, and his own son, assume he was retired, diminished, and entirely irrelevant.
But my family knew exactly who he was.
That was the filthiest, most sickening part of it all.
