Frankie's Obsession

5 - Red's the Real Green.

"A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green."

- Francis Bacon

Everything was going to shit.

Theodore had locked himself in his room with his broken pride, too ashamed to show his face, and the family name, the one we had bled to build, was being smeared across every gossip column in the city. People were loving it. Everywhere I went I could feel their eyes on me, waiting to see if we'd crumble for good.

And the worst part? I didn't see it coming.

Daniel, that fucking idiot, had been sleeping with his father's girlfriend right under my nose, and somehow the enemy sniffed it out before I did. That burned. That kept me up at night. I was supposed to know everything that moved in this city, in my family and I missed the one thing that could bring us down.

He didn't even have the balls to stay and face it. Daniel grabbed that woman and disappeared the second the story broke. And mu uncle, the strongest man I had ever known, just fell apart. He stopped eating, stopped talking, stopped everything. Watching him crumble was worse than the scandal itself.

So I threw myself into the work. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating proper meals. I sat in front of screens for hours, scrolling through security footage, pulling at digital threads, talking to expert after expert who took my money and gave me nothing but theories that went fucking nowhere.

Somebody had lit the match, and I wasn't going to rest until I found them and put them in the ground.

But I still had to show up for breakfast.

I walked into the dining room with a smile painted on and kissed my mother on the forehead. "Morning, beautiful."

She looked up at me with tired eyes and smiled back, and for a second I remembered why I was still fighting. "Good morning, honey," she said, touching my face with a gentleness that almost broke me.

I moved to Madison and kissed the top of her head. "Morning, sweetie."

She didn't look up from her coffee. "Morning, Tori."

Nobody spoke for a while. Then my mother set her cup down and asked, "Any word from Daniel?"

I shook my head. "Not yet. But I'll find him."

Madison's eyes came up then, wet and red. "I don't understand how he could do this," she said. "Uncle Theo has given him everything. Everything."

She wasn't wrong. Theodore had raised us after our father died. He showed up for every school event, every fight, every failure. He was more of a father than ours ever got the chance to be. That's why this cut so deep. Daniel didn't just betray the family. He drove a knife into the one man who had held us all together.

I ran a hand over the back of my neck. "We don't talk about it around him. He's got enough weight on him already."

Madison nodded, her jaw tight, like she was swallowing words she wanted to say.