Chapter 7 – THE BLACKOUT CONFESSION

I stared at the glowing screen of my phone, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

Ask Jonathan what happened in the blackout of 1998.

1998. The year Jonathan’s mother had spilled candle wax on the piano. The year Camille was legally adopted into the family.

I looked up. Jonathan was walking Maya toward his armored SUV, wrapping a wool blanket around her shoulders. He looked like a protector. A good man.

But in this family, no one was truly innocent.

I walked over to the SUV just as the driver closed the door, leaving Maya safely inside.

“Jonathan,” I said, my voice trembling slightly. “I need to ask you something.”

He turned, wiping a smear of soot from his forehead. “What is it, Eleanor? We need to get to the hospital to check on Camille.”

“What happened during the blackout of 1998?”

Jonathan froze. The exhaustion in his face vanished, replaced by a sudden, terrifying stillness. He looked around the alleyway, ensuring the police were out of earshot.

“Who told you about that?” he asked, his voice dropping an octave.

“A text message. Just now.” I held up my phone.

He didn’t look at the screen. He just stared at me. “Eleanor, drop it. It has nothing to do with Arthur or the foundation.”

“Don’t lie to me, Jonathan. Your mother spilled wax on that piano because she was panicking in the dark. What was she panicking about?”

Jonathan closed his eyes. When he opened them, the billionaire facade was gone. He looked like a frightened thirty-eight-year-old boy.

“She wasn’t panicking,” Jonathan whispered. “She was cleaning up blood.”

My breath hitched. “Whose blood?”

“My father’s.”

I took a step back. “Arthur killed your father.”

“Arthur poisoned my mother and your sister,” Jonathan corrected quietly. “But he didn’t kill my father. My father died of a massive head wound in 1998. During the blackout.”

“But… the funeral wasn’t until 2016,” I stammered, my mind racing. “Your father ran the company for almost twenty years after that!”

“No, he didn’t.” Jonathan looked at the ground. “My father was an abusive monster. During the blackout, he cornered my mother in the ballroom. He was going to kill her. I was fourteen years old. I picked up a heavy brass candelabra… and I hit him. From behind. He died instantly on the marble floor.”

I covered my mouth in horror.

“My mother dragged his body into the cellar,” Jonathan continued, tears finally spilling over his eyelashes. “She spilled the candle wax on the piano trying to light the room to clean the blood. And then… she called Arthur.”

The puzzle pieces locked into a horrifying picture.

“Arthur covered up the murder,” I whispered.

“Arthur found a lookalike. A corporate actor,” Jonathan said bitterly. “He paid for plastic surgery. He trained the man to act like my father. The man you thought was my father for twenty years was an imposter controlled entirely by Arthur Pendelton. That’s how Arthur drained the foundation. He held the murder over my mother’s head until the day she died.”

My head was spinning. The man my sister had an affair with wasn’t the real billionaire. It was the imposter. Arthur had used my sister to blackmail an imposter to steal from a grieving widow.

“Who sent the text message, Eleanor?” Jonathan asked, his eyes dark.

I looked down at the phone. The screen flickered, and a second message arrived.

Look in the trunk of Arthur’s car.

I pointed toward the sleek black Mercedes parked at the end of the alley, cordoned off by police tape.

Jonathan didn’t wait for the cops. He walked briskly to the Mercedes, grabbed a heavy police flashlight from the hood of a cruiser, and smashed the driver’s side window.

“Hey! You can’t do that!” a patrol officer yelled, running over.

Jonathan ignored him. He reached through the broken glass and popped the trunk release.

The trunk clicked open.

Jonathan lifted the lid.

Inside, bound and gagged with duct tape, was a man in his late sixties. He was battered, bruised, and terrified.

I gasped.

It was the imposter. The fake father.

But as Jonathan reached in to pull the tape from the man’s mouth, the man shook his head violently, his eyes wide with panic. He wasn’t looking at Jonathan.

He was looking at the small, flashing red light wired to the bottom of the trunk.

“Jonathan, run!” I screamed.

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