Lucien POV
The headlines changed.
Not into condolences. Into questions.
Not mourning. Strategy.
"Harvard Boy to Inherit Billions – But Is He Ready?"
"Whispers of Puppetry: Rosario Tantoco's Grip on the ET Empire."
"Tech Bro or Dynasty Figurehead?"
It was obvious who fed them. My father's half-brothers—the men who'd been circling for decades, too polished to look desperate but too predictable to mask the stench of ambition.
They were the sons of the second family. The ones my grandfather sired with his mistress-turned-common-law wife, raised in mansions but not born from the marriage certificate that sealed power.
One of them was even older than my father—technically the first-born son.
But tradition matters in Chinese families. The legitimate son—the son from the first wife—is the heir, no matter who came first.
My father, Oliver Tantoco, had been that heir. Elegant, educated, dangerously charming. He never needed to raise his voice to command a room. He was the bridge between old money and modern empire—the one who knew how to pacify his father and out-negotiate foreign partners in the same breath.
But he was also... too kind.
He hated conflict. Hated mess.
He played the long game, always choosing diplomacy over dominance.
And in the end, when he died unexpectedly—cardiac arrest, mid-flight—it wasn't just a tragedy. It was blood in the water.
Because with him gone, there was no longer an heir apparent.
And for the first time in fifty years, the throne was open.
That's when my grandmother summoned me. Not to mourn. Not to grieve. But to plan.
Rosario Lim-Tantoco, or Nainai, as we affectionately call her at home, was not a woman who allowed grief to slow her. I found her in the solarium of the old house in Forbes—the one that still smelled like incense, wood polish, and bloodline.
She was dressed in matte black, a gold brooch pinned to her collar. Her teacup barely rattled when she set it down. She didn't even look up.
"I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me."
"I was dealing with logistics," I replied. "And the board."
"So was I. They're already calculating succession. You know that, don't you?"
"I expected it."
She finally looked up. Her eyes hadn't dulled with age. If anything, the lines around them had sharpened—she looked carved from something older than stone.
"They're going to come for your seat," she said. "The sons of the second wife. The cousins who think their MBA entitles them to dominion. They'll question your competence. Your background. Your loyalty to this land."
"I'm not afraid."
"You should be," she said, softly but without hesitation. "Because they're not just fighting for control. They're fighting to erase you. That's what this is."
I sat across from her. "You raised my father to inherit this empire."
"I raised him to protect it. And maybe I failed. Maybe I should've made him hungrier. He believed in compromise."
"You don't?"
She smiled faintly. "I believe in survival."
They didn't waste time launching their campaign. Every article, every anonymous quote, every post dressed up as opinion—they all told the same story.
Lucius Adrien Tantoco. Harvard-educated. Code-savvy. But green. Book-smart. Naïve. A Westernized pretty boy with a trust fund and no grip on "real" Filipino business.
Meanwhile, the uncles—the aging sons of the second family—lined up to remind everyone they were the ones with "experience." They said they had built the finance arm. Overseen logistics. Managed trade expansions. Never mind they'd inherited turnkey divisions and operated like old boys passing chips at a poker table. They were "hands-on." I was theory.
According to them, I belonged in Silicon Valley. Not in Manila. Not in boardrooms. And certainly not in control.
They said my grandmother was just trying to cling to power through me.
I read it all.
And said nothing.
What they didn't understand was that I had planned for this.
Maybe not this early. Maybe not in this exact shape. But I always knew this day would come.
So I trained. Quietly. Relentlessly. Every year in Palo Alto.
Every midnight call with my father about board appointments and shareholder moves. Every meeting I attended as a teenager where I wasn't allowed to speak—only watch. All of it had been intentional.
I built startups from scratch. Failed one, stabilized another. Learned to pitch to VCs who didn't care about surnames, only burn rate and product-market fit.
By the time I came home, I wasn't carrying dreams—I was carrying execution.
Maharlika Airways was my first target. I modernized our loyalty system, launched a full digital overhaul, implemented a CRM pipeline that finally made our customer experience match our price point.
Domestic complaints dropped. Revenue spiked. Retention surged. I secured a fintech integration with a Singaporean partner that cut transaction delays and gave us live analytics on passenger behavior.
It wasn't just innovation. It was results. Results they couldn't ignore.
When the board still tried to test me—still floated words like "book smarts" or "too theoretical"—I moved on to other sectors. Telecom. Logistics. Asset management.
I showed up to meetings they didn't expect me at and spoke in metrics they didn't expect me to know. One by one, I made myself useful in places they'd assumed I wouldn't last.
They thought I'd burn out. That I was too polished. Too Western. That this empire would chew me up like it did my father.
But they didn't realize—I wasn't improvising.
I was built for this.
And even when the numbers silenced the whispers, I still couldn't sleep. I'd lie awake, staring at a city that bowed when my surname was mentioned, wondering if I was doing the right thing.
I thought of my father. His calm. His charm. How he never had to dominate to lead. He would've told me to breathe. To laugh more. To stop gripping the wheel so tightly.
But I couldn't. Not now. Because I knew what happened when men in this family relaxed. They got replaced. Rewritten. Erased.
And I would not be erased.
Not by legacy-hungry cousins. Not by PR puppeteers. Not by second wives' sons who thought entitlement was the same thing as inheritance.
I was here.
I was the heir.
And I would remind them—every quarter, every vote, every decision—why legacy chose me.
The pressure inside the boardroom was only matched by the silence at home. My mother, Lilia, remained composed—graceful, detached in her own way.
She never challenged me outright. Never told me to slow down. But she was watching. She always had been.
One night, we stood side by side on the balcony. Manila stretched below us, glittering and strange.
"You're not sleeping," she said quietly.
"I don't have time."
"You should make time. Or else this empire will eat you alive before it crowns you."
I glanced at her. "You didn't want me to take over."
"No," she said. "I wanted your father to live long enough so you wouldn't have to."
I didn't reply. There was nothing to say.
She reached for my hand, briefly. "Your grandmother will make you into something powerful," she said.
"Just make sure she doesn't make you forget who you are." she continued.
Moreover, my younger brother and only sibling, Jaden, came home.
He walked into my condo, looked around, and whistled. "You redecorated," he said, flopping onto the couch. "Less start-up, more billionaire dungeon."
I didn't look up from my screen. "I outgrew beanbags."
"You also outgrew idealism," he said, raising a brow.
I closed the tablet. "What do you mean?"
"You were the one who said you wanted to build something clean. Disruptive. Yours. Now you're playing their game with their rules, using Dad's seat like a chessboard."
I leaned back. "This is mine."
"No," he said, gentler this time. "This was always theirs."
I didn't deny it. "I didn't take this for power," I said. "I took it to protect what Dad built. What Nainai fought for. If I didn't, someone else would've gutted it from the inside."
Jaden looked at me for a long time. Then he sighed. "Just don't let them turn you into a weapon. That's what we do in this family, right? Polish the sharpest one and send him to war."
I didn't answer. Because deep down—I wasn't sure if that's exactly what I had become.
Still, he wasn't just back to visit. Nainai called him home too. Quietly. Strategically. Appointed him a director under the family trust to oversee innovation and brand partnerships.
It wasn't a favor. It was a message.
Rosario Tantoco was consolidating. Cleaning house. Rebuilding the group around the first family. No more inheritance for outsiders. No more board votes for second wives' sons or nephews with inflated titles.
Jaden and I were it.
First blood.
First family.
The future.
"She trusts you more than you think," I told him once.
He was drinking a beer, legs kicked up like he owned the skyline.
"She also thinks I'm lazy," he replied, cracking the cap. "But lazy men see the game better. We're not too busy playing it."
I smirked. "You know she's using you."
"Better to be used by the queen," he said, "than eaten by the court."
And he wasn't wrong.
Even with Jaden beside me, even with Maharlika outperforming projections and the board finally shutting up—I knew the war wasn't over.
It never really was. The narrative just shifted.
When they could no longer attack my performance, they started attacking my personality. Whispers of arrogance. Emotional coldness. Speculation about why I wasn't married, wasn't dating, didn't bring dates to charity balls.
"He's distant," one article claimed. "Impossible to read. Cold like Rosario but without her warmth."
Another headline asked, "What is Lucien Tantoco hiding?"
The answer was simple: nothing. And everything. Because they weren't really asking about secrets. They were searching for weakness. And I gave them none.