Chapter 562
Chapter 561:
Justin stepped forward, his shadow falling over Ferris. “This isn’t a family drama anymore,” he said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. “This is about Conrad Sterling. He’s using this to blackmail us — which means you are now an accessory. You will tell us everything you know p>
Ferris closed his eyes. He let out a long, heavy sigh, looking like a man who had been carrying an enormous weight for seven years and had finally felt it crush him.
He walked to the leather armchair and collapsed into it.
“We didn’t have a choice,” he said softly. “Sterling had us. He had all of us p>
“A choice to do what?” Carmen demanded, marching over to stand directly above him. “To erase my mother’s real death p>
Ferris looked up at them, his eyes hollow and defeated. “The cover-up — it wasn’t about your mother’s death. That was just a loose end. It was about what happened right before the crash p>
He hesitated, his gaze moving between Carmen’s furious face and Justin’s unyielding one.
“Your father,” Ferris said, his voice dropping to barely a whisper. “He had just discovered a massive money-laundering scheme. Millions of dollars being funneled through offshore accounts, disguised as campaign donations. He had the proof — the account numbers, everything. He was on his way to meet with the Attorney General p>
Carmen’s heart stopped. Justin’s expression hardened into one of cold, dawning horror.
“Whose campaign?” Justin asked, the words sharp as glass.
Ferris looked at the floor. “Sterling’s biggest client at the time. A man he was grooming for the highest levels of power. The donations were for his first major Senate race p>
𝗗i𝘴сo𝘷𝖾𝗿 𝗇𝘦𝘸 s𝘵о𝘳𝘪𝖾s о𝗇 𝗴a𝗹ո𝗈vе𝗅s.𝘤𝗈𝘮
“The crash wasn’t an accident, was it?” Carmen whispered. The horrifying truth settled over her like a shroud.
Ferris shook his head slowly. “The state police ruled it black ice. But Sterling was there within an hour. He handled everything. He told us your mother, in her grief, had jumped from the bridge. He said that if we challenged the story, the scandal would destroy the Golden family name forever. He told us he was protecting us p>
“He wasn’t protecting you,” Justin said coldly. “He was burying evidence of a political assassination p>
The room fell silent.
The lie they had lived with for seven years had never been a shield for them. It had been a shield for a murderer.
Carmen stared at her cousin — not with pity, but with a burning, clarifying rage. The personal betrayal was immense, yet it was dwarfed by the scale of the crime. Her parents hadn’t died because of a tragedy. They had been executed for threatening the wrong man.
The guilt she had carried for years, the story of her mother’s tragic suicide, was a fabrication — carefully constructed to conceal something monstrous.
She had come here wanting answers. Now, the answers had given her a target.
The morning sun sliced through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Manhattan penthouse, casting bright, sharp lines across the massive bed.
Jocelyn Wolfe woke with a violent jolt.