Tattooed in Moonlight

Epilogue

Epilogue

I don't remember the first toy I ever had.

But I remember the first ledger.

It was thick, leather-bound, heavy in my small hands. I was eight, maybe nine, and while other children played with cars or dolls, my father sat me at his desk and slid the ledger across the polished wood like he was handing me a sword.

"Travis," Thaddeus Verzosa Javierres said, his voice calm but weighty, "numbers don't lie. Learn them early, and you'll never be deceived."

My father never shouted. He never needed to. His silence was enough to command obedience. His words were lessons carved into marble.

I flipped the ledger open, saw columns of figures, notes in his sharp hand, tallies that ran into the millions. At nine, I didn't understand half of it, but I nodded. Because when you were a Javierres child, nodding was expected.

I didn't play with the ledger. I studied it.

By the time I was twelve, I could read balance sheets better than novels. By fourteen, I was shadowing hotel managers, walking marble lobbies while my classmates played football in muddy fields. By sixteen, I was drafting proposals on acquisitions I wasn't legally old enough to sign.

My childhood wasn't playgrounds. It was boardrooms.

And yet, it wasn't ruthless. My parents wouldn't allow it.

"Profit without people is rot," my mother, Mavis Montejarre-Javierres, told me once, as we visited an orphanage her foundation funded. She held a child in her arms, a boy with wide eyes who had nothing but the shirt on his back, and she looked at me with that quiet wisdom only she possessed. "Our name is not for us, Travis. It is for them. Remember that."

I remembered.

Other dynasties taught their children to hoard. Mine taught me to give. To build. To hold power without letting it poison me.

But it was still power. And it was heavy.

Even Raelina and Zaelina, my younger twin sisters, understood it. They would tug at my sleeve, begging me to play, and I'd smile, try for a while, but my mind was always on ledgers and plans. They teased me for being too serious, too quiet. "Our kuya is forty years old in a sixteen-year-old's body," they'd giggle.

They weren't wrong.

Because while they laughed, I was already carrying the world.

I didn't hate it. Responsibility was oxygen to me. I thrived on it.

But it left no room for love. It was always legacy... Legacy was never an option. It was a sentence.

By the time I turned fifteen, the weight of the Javierres empire pressed on my shoulders so tightly that sometimes I forgot what my own skin felt like without it.

I was no longer the boy given ledgers as toys—I was the young heir being trained to sit at tables where fortunes were decided, where one nod could employ thousands, and one miscalculation could topple an empire.

At fifteen, I was already flying with my father to Tokyo, Singapore, Dubai, walking through luxury hotels that smelled of polished wood and ambition. My classmates were at arcades, wasting coins on games. I was shaking hands with CEOs twice my age, repeating words I had memorized in the mirror the night before.

"Learn their language," my father said, and he didn't mean Japanese or Mandarin. He meant the language of profit. Of deals. Of numbers that lived on paper but moved flesh-and-blood lives.

At sixteen, I was in boardrooms, silent in the corner, but my silence was not emptiness. I absorbed everything—the way voices shifted when money was at stake, the way eyes darted when lies were told, the subtle twitch of a hand before a man signed away his own leverage.