The Billionaire I Was Meant To Hate

Chapter 10: Two Letters

The subpoena took four days to process, which felt like four years.

Sophie filed it through Carter & Hughes under the pretense of standard discovery for the Blackwood litigation —

technically true, since Halcyon Advisory Group's transactions ran close enough to the timeline of the lawsuit to justify

the request without raising questions about why a corporate associate suddenly cared about a defunct shell company's

mailing address.

"You know if anyone at the firm actually reads this filing closely, they're going to ask why you're subpoenaing a UPS

store," Sophie said, watching me pace her office while we waited for the response to come through.

"Then we'll deal with that when it happens."

"That's not a plan, that's a hope." But she said it without heat, already pulling up her email for the fourth time that hour.

"For what it's worth, whatever's in this response, I want you to actually look at it with me before you do anything with

it. Not alone at your kitchen table at midnight."

"I hear you."

"I mean it, Aria."

"I know you do." And I did — Sophie had spent two weeks building a case with the same care she'd bring to her own,

and I wasn't about to throw that away by running off half-informed the second something landed in an inbox.

Her computer chimed.

We both went still.

Sophie opened the response and scanned it fast, the way she read everything, and I watched her expression change

from professional focus to something sharper.

"The mailbox is registered to a private account holder," she said. "Not a company name. A person."

"Who?"

She turned the screen toward me.

The field for account holder read simply: M. Blackwood.

I stared at it long enough that the letters stopped looking like letters.

"That's not enough to mean anything," Sophie said carefully, watching my face. "Marcus. Damian's father. For all we

know it's a cousin twice removed neither of them has mentioned. An initial and a last name isn't a confession."

"I know." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I know that."

But I was already thinking about the notarization logs, the ones Damian had finally released, the ones with a

witness signature on the very last page of the amendment I still hadn't been able to place. A signature I'd assumed

belonged to some notary's assistant, illegible enough that I'd moved past it without a second thought.

I pulled up the photograph on my phone and zoomed in until the pixels blurred.

Two letters, in a hand distinct from the rest of the document. M.B.

The same two letters staring back at me from Sophie's screen.

"Sophie." My hands weren't quite steady anymore. "This is the same initials as the ones on the amendment page. The

ones I thought belonged to a notary's witness."

Sophie leaned over my shoulder, comparing the two. "That's not proof. Handwriting analysis isn't something either

of us is qualified to do off a phone photo."

"I know that too." I was already standing, already reaching for my bag. "But it's enough to ask

Damian something I should have asked him five days ago."

"Ask him what?"

I looked at her, and, at last, the question I'd been circling without saying out loud finally came out whole.

"I need to know his father's first name."

Sophie's face went carefully blank in the particular way it did when she understood exactly what I was asking and

didn't like where it led. "Aria—"

"If it starts with an M," I said, "then I don't know which Blackwood I've been looking for this whole time. And until I do, I

don't know if the man I've been trusting with all of this is protecting the truth — or protecting his own father's grave."

I was out the door before she could answer, the initials burned into my mind, the certainty I'd carried into that first

meeting with Damian five weeks ago finally, completely gone.

---

Across town, a man who had spent days avoiding a decision finally made one.

He didn't call his father. He didn't call Damian, either, not yet — some part of him still needed to be sure before he

handed over a piece of paper that would end one version of his family and start another.

He pulled up a name in his phone he'd only saved a week ago, after their strange, careful conversation in the

records room, and typed a message he deleted and rewrote three times before he let himself send it.

This is Marcus. I have something you need to see. Not here. Somewhere neither of us can be overheard.

He stared at the screen for a long moment after it sent, the folded bank authorization form still sitting on the desk in

front of him like it might change its mind about what it said if he looked away too long.

It didn't.

Three floors below Aria's apartment, her phone lit up with a name she hadn't expected to hear from directly —

ever.