Anya’s breath hitched, every fiber of her being attuned to Elias. His voice, usually a steady rumble, now scraped like gravel, raw with decades of suppressed pain. His eyes, glazed with a distant horror, stared past her, seeing something no one else could. “Broken glass,” he rasped, a shudder running through his powerful frame. “The rain… it was everywhere. Red taillights, blurring into nothing.” Rain lashed against the windows of his study, mirroring the storm brewing inside him. A cold shiver traced Anya's spine, not from the temperature, but from the chilling echo in his words. “Kestrel was everything to my father,” Elias continued, his voice barely a whisper. “He was obsessed. Convinced someone wanted the data, the algorithms. He was right, wasn’t he?” Anya nodded slowly, her own throat tight. The pieces of the puzzle, laid out by the recent scandal, were beginning to form a grim picture. “That night,” Elias said, his hands clenching into fists on his knees, knuckles bone-white. “Father had just finished a late meeting. Mother was worried. Leo… my little brother, Leo… he was so excited about a new game, begged to go with me to pick them up.” Her heart squeezed. A younger brother. Elias never mentioned him. “I drove,” he confessed, the words ripping from him. “I was seventeen. Thought I was invincible.” Seventeen. A pang of understanding, then dread, twisted in Anya’s gut. The weight of driving, the responsibility at that age. She could almost picture it. “Father called, his voice urgent,” Elias went on, his gaze fixed on a point beyond the wall. “Said he had a feeling. Told me to take the back roads, avoid the main highway. Said to watch for a specific model, a dark sedan. Paranoia, I thought. Just Father being Father.” He scoffed, a dry, humorless sound. “Leo, he was chattering beside me, holding his new handheld console. Said he saw something. A bird, a hawk, flying low across the road.” Anya listened, her own breath held captive. The details were so vivid, so precise, yet Elias's tone was flat, devoid of emotion, as if narrating a story he’d replayed a million times. “I looked over. Just for a second. To see what he meant. He loved birds. Said he wanted to be an ornithologist when he grew up.” Anya felt a cold dread creep over her. The casualness of the detail, the way he recounted it, sent shivers down her arms. A glance. A distraction. “When I looked back,” Elias continued, his voice dropping to a near inaudible level, “the rain was heavier. The car… I was going too fast for that bend. Trying to make up time. Trying to impress Father by being efficient.” His jaw flexed, a muscle twitching violently. “I swerved. Hard. To avoid… I don’t even remember what. Just that sudden panic.” Anya's blood ran cold. The pieces of Elias's fragmented memories, the

Chapter 25: The Devastating Truth