It was the photograph, and it was my face.

The law told him he had lost.

But the face told him something worse, something no injunction could touch: that the story he had built his whole life on was false.

Julian had grown up believing he was the eldest child, the heir, the firstborn son of a self-made man.

And in the space of a single afternoon, he learned that he was not the eldest at all, that there had been another child first, a daughter, abandoned, and that his entire inheritance, the empire he had counted on and schemed for and treated his dying father as a vault to secure, had been built on the wreckage of that abandoned child’s life.

He learned that his father’s fortune was not a legacy but a theft, and that he, Julian, was not the rightful heir to a great man’s success but the pampered beneficiary of a great man’s crime.