The atmosphere in my Grandfather’s grand dining room was not one of celebration, but of a brittle, suffocating pretense. The room itself was a monument to the family’s immense wealth—a long, polished mahogany table that could seat thirty, oil paintings of stern-faced ancestors staring down from the walls, and a crystal chandelier that dripped light like frozen diamonds. But tonight, for Grandfather’s eightieth birthday, all that opulence only served to amplify the hollowness, the ugly, festering wound at the heart of our family.
Months earlier, a tragedy had struck, a sacrilege in the religion of our dynasty: the Heirloom Watch—a Patek Philippe timepiece passed down for generations, a treasure whose value was not just monetary but symbolic of our entire legacy—had vanished from my grandfather’s study. The truth was a sordid, pathetic secret I had uncovered on my own: my brother, Lucas, handsome, charming, and rotting from the inside out with a gambling addiction, had stolen and sold it to cover a mountain of debt.
But the injustice that followed was swift, brutal, and profound. My Father…