Chapter 53 - The Patriarch's Shadow
Thousands of miles away, inside the maximum-security federal holding facility in Geneva, Álvaro Miller sat shivering in an orange jumpsuit.
Once the proud, immaculate titan who scoffed at his genius twins and sneered at their humble origins, Álvaro was now a hollow shell. His tailored Italian suits had been stripped away; his hair was matted with sweat; his multi-billion-dollar bank accounts had been frozen by every sovereign treasury on the planet. He was a ruined man awaiting a lifetime behind bars for high treason and economic espionage.
"Visiting hours are closed," Álvaro rasped without looking up as footsteps echoed outside his solitary cell. "Leave me alone. If you're Vance's lawyers, tell Julian I'll drag him down to hell with me."
The steel bars did not slide open; they were severed cleanly by an ultra-high-frequency thermal blade.
Three operatives clad in unmarked obsidian combat armor stepped into the cell. Behind them walked an elderly man with silver hair slicked back, wearing a bespoke three-piece wool suit that looked utterly incongruous with the damp concrete of a prison block. In his hand, he carried a polished ebony cane tipped with platinum.
Álvaro looked up, and all color drained from his face. His jaw trembled, and he collapsed onto his knees in pure, instinctive terror.
"F-Father...?" Álvaro choked out, his voice cracking like a terrified child’s. "You... you died twenty years ago. The plane crash over the Pacific..."
"A convenient fiction designed to rid me of useless baggage," Aurelius Miller said, looking down at his son with the same contempt Álvaro had once shown to Mateo and Marcos. "You were always a profound disappointment, Álvaro. A mediocre boy who stole other people’s equations, preened on television, and thought he was a king because he bought skyscrapers with borrowed money."
"I built an empire!" Álvaro cried out, clawing at the concrete floor. "I wiped out the twins' mother! I destroyed anyone who stood in my way!"
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"You built a cardboard house that was completely dismantled by two ten-year-old boys armed with a single folder of paper," Aurelius replied, his voice colder than outer space. "You failed to exploit the true legacy of our blood. You squandered our family’s seat at the true Genesis table to play at being a CEO."
Aurelius turned on his heel. "Bring him. He is worthless as an heir, but his biometric sequence is still half of the ancestral genetic key. The other half... has already arrived at the cradle."
