Chapter 201
“The future is dangerous,” Victoria replied. “You spent your youth tinkering with engines, and look where it has left you — a broken arm, a failing marriage, and a husband who has turned this family into a public spectacle. You made yourself a target. I will not allow Effie to suffer the same fate.”
Effie dropped her fork. It clattered against the plate. She looked up, her expression not one of hurt, but of genuine confusion. “Is that why Daddy isn’t here?” she asked, her voice clear and steady. “Because he doesn’t understand the numbers?”
Something inside Isolde didn’t merely snap. It ignited. The last thread of deference binding her to this family burned away.
She stood up. “That is enough.”
Victoria’s eyes widened. “Sit down. We are not finished.”
“We are,” Isolde said. She walked around the table and helped Effie down from her chair. Effie took her bandaged hand with great care. “You can insult me all you want, Victoria. You can dress your cruelty up as concern. But you will not poison my daughter’s mind. You will not make her feel small because she is smart.”
“You walk out that door,” Victoria warned, her voice trembling with indignation, “and you disrespect the Lancaster name.”
“The Lancaster name is already rotting,” Isolde said. “Grayson is managing that perfectly well without my help.”
She led Effie out of the dining room, past the stunned staff, and out to the car Arland had arranged. She buckled Effie in. Effie was quiet.
𝘓at𝘦𝗌t 𝘤𝗁ар𝗍𝘦𝘳𝗌 𝘰𝗇 𝗴𝗮𝗹ո𝘰𝗏𝖾𝗅𝘀.𝘤𝗼𝘮
“Mommy,” Effie said as Isolde started the engine. “Grandmother is like a broken equation. The parts don’t add up to the right answer.”
Isolde looked at her daughter in the rearview mirror, and for the first time since the funeral, she smiled — a real smile. “You are absolutely right, Effie. And we don’t have to solve her.”
As she drove them back through the city, the lights blurring past the windows, a news alert flashed on the car’s display.
INNOTECH TO UNVEIL ‘ICARUS’ DRONE PROPULSION SYSTEM AT NELSON SYMPOSIUM.
She turned up the volume. The screen showed a sleek computer-generated model of a drone engine. A spokesperson — Belle — was speaking about revolutionary airflow dynamics.
Isolde stared at the screen. She knew those curves. She knew that intake manifold.
Belle had stolen it. She must have found Isolde’s old sketchbooks in the penthouse study.
If they built that prototype, it wouldn’t just fail. It would explode. People could die. And Grayson had poured two hundred million dollars of family money into it.
The original sketchbooks — the hand-drawn schematics — were still in the penthouse. They were the one thing that would prove her intellectual property claim beyond any legal doubt. The digital files on the drive were her work, but the physical books were her history. Her grandmother’s legacy lived in the notes scrawled in the margins.
She looked out at the sky. A storm was rolling in, the clouds turning a bruised, deep purple.
She had to get those books.
The wind nearly ripped the car door from her hand as she parked in front of Lancaster Tower. Rain was coming down in sheets, turning the streetlights into blurred streaks of color.
.