Chapter 19 - What My Father Feared
The countdown reached two minutes and forty seconds.
The question remained on the screen.
WHAT DID ARTHUR RHODES FEAR MORE THAN DEATH?
Charles laughed from the floor.
“He never told you.”
I ignored him.
What had my father feared?
Losing the company?
Exposure?
Prison?
The end of the Rhodes bloodline?
Rose typed BLOODLINE EXTINCTION.
ACCESS DENIED.
Two attempts remaining.
The timer continued.
02:21.
Samuel pressed cloth against Hunter’s wound while calling for the medical team.
Agent Morris held Charles down.
Margaret cut the rope from her wrists.
Daniel’s voice came faintly through the intercom.
“Kylie, remember the lake house.”
I closed my eyes.
The lake house.
I was eleven.
A storm had knocked out the power.
My father sat beside the fireplace, staring at a newspaper article about a corporate scandal.
I asked whether he was afraid of losing his money.
He said no.
Money could be rebuilt.
I asked whether he feared dying.
He said death was simple.
Then he looked at Daniel and me.
“What frightens me,” he said, “is leaving my children a lie so large they mistake it for their name.”
I opened my eyes.
“He feared becoming the lie we inherited.”
Rose stared at me.
“What should I type?”
I looked at the screen.
Not exposure.
Not death.
Not losing us.
He feared that we would become him.
“Type: His children repeating his sins.”
Rose entered the words.
ACCESS DENIED.
One attempt remaining.
01:34.
Charles smiled.
“Close.”
The archive began deleting secondary files.
Photographs vanished.
Payment histories disappeared.
Hunter’s breathing became shallow.
I knelt beside him.
“Stay awake.”
He looked at me.
“I’m sorry.”
“Save your strength.”
“No. I need you to hear it.”
“You can say it later.”
“I may not have later.”
My eyes burned.
“You don’t get to escape that easily.”
He almost smiled.
Then his eyes closed.
I slapped his cheek.
“Hunter.”
Samuel checked his pulse.
“He’s alive.”
The timer reached fifty-nine seconds.
I looked around the room.
Charles.
Bell.
Arthur.
Hunter.
David.
Daniel.
Every man believed control could protect the people they loved.
Every secret created another victim.
Arthur did not fear his children repeating his sins.
He feared losing the power to stop them.
That was his flaw.
He had never trusted truth.
Because truth could no longer be controlled once released.
“What did he fear more than death?” Rose whispered.
I understood.
“Being powerless.”
Charles laughed.
“Too simple.”
I shook my head.
“Not powerlessness.”
The timer reached thirty seconds.
“He feared the truth belonging to someone else.”
Rose typed the words.
THE TRUTH OUTLIVING HIS CONTROL.
The screen paused.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Then the countdown disappeared.
ARCHIVE UNLOCKED.
Every file duplicated automatically to federal servers.
Agent Morris’s phone lit with confirmations.
Charles stopped laughing.
The archive began revealing the full network.
Judges.
Doctors.
Bankers.
Executives.
Families who bought children.
Families who unknowingly raised stolen embryos.
And one folder marked:
KYLIE RHODES — ORIGINAL BIRTH RECORD.
I opened it.
My biological father was Thomas Laurent.
That part was true.
My mother had asked Arthur to raise me because Thomas died before I was born.
Not murdered.
Not hidden.
He died exposing Bell’s first illegal experiment.
Arthur had loved my mother.
He accepted me as his daughter.
But fear changed him.
He used the project’s stolen money to build protective trusts.
He hid children.
He manipulated identities.
He convinced himself that good intentions excused every crime.
He had been both protector and criminal.
The truth did not make him a monster.
It did not make him innocent either.
Another folder opened.
It contained the current locations of twenty-seven surviving Legacy children.
Five were still missing.
One record had been accessed that morning.
The buyer field listed a private foundation controlled by Isabelle.
I stared at the screen.
She had claimed Bell deceived her.
But she had access to the project long before her pregnancy.
A security camera feed appeared.
Isabelle was no longer waiting with Dr. Crowe.
She stood in the estate’s medical storage room, removing frozen embryo containers.
Victor lay unconscious on the floor behind her.
May you like
Then she looked directly into the camera and smiled.
👉 Isabelle had appeared to be another victim of Hunter and Bell, but the embryos in her hands proved she had been planning her own inheritance scheme from the beginning.
