It was the kind of thing that, in a decent family, would have been a story told with rue at some future holiday, a hard lesson survived.

But Dorian did not see his brother’s old failure as a wound to be gentle with.

He saw it as raw material.

He had taken the one thing Silas was most ashamed of, the secret his brother had trusted no one with, and he had built a frame around it — reactivated the dead company’s credentials, run millions in phantom invoices through its name, engineered the paper trail so that when the fraud was discovered, it would point at Silas like an accusing finger.

He had chosen his own brother as the fall guy precisely because Silas’s shame would make him look guilty, because a man who had hidden a bankruptcy would seem exactly like a man who might hide an embezzlement.

It was a betrayal folded inside a betrayal: Dorian had needed someone to take the blame for the eight million he was stealing, and he had reached, without apparent hesitation, for the person who shared his own last name.