Chapter 33 33

Chapter 33 33
VICTOR LAURENT

The nine o’clock news droned on, a white-noise backdrop to the silence of the house, but my mind was elsewhere. I watched the hallway. It had been forty minutes since Caesar and Iris had disappeared upstairs without a single look passing between them.

They’d fought. Excellent.

I reached for my whiskey, the ice clinking a soft, melodic note against the crystal.

Two people in love were difficult to manage... But two people who couldn’t stand to be in the same room? They were far easier to work with. They looked outward for comfort and made desperate decisions. They became, with the right amount of pressure, remarkably useful.

I turned the television off and sat in the quiet.

The merger was a day away from completion. Quinn Enterprises was already half-absorbed and Iris would sign whatever remained once she understood her options had run out.

And Caesar—

My phone buzzed on the mahogany side table. A private number.

I took one last sip of the peat-heavy scotch before answering. “Who is this?”

“It’s Aaron.” His voice was smooth, lacking the tremor a man should have when calling me. “I’m at your gates. Tell your security to stand down, or things are going to get very loud, very quickly.”

I sat forward, the leather of my chair creaking. “You were told never to set foot on this estate without an invitation. Have you grown bored of living, Aaron?”

“I’m just bored of waiting,” he countered. I could hear the faint hum of his engine in the background. “Besides, there are some things better said in person. Unless you’d prefer I say them somewhere less private.”

“Stay at the gate.”

I ended the call and let the phone drop onto the cushion. Outside, I signaled security to hold their position twenty feet back. I didn’t need an audience for a mess like this.

Aaron was leaning against the ironwork when I arrived, hands deep in his pockets. In the harsh glare of the security floods, he looked exactly like his mother with the same tilt of the head and hollow charm.

I stopped at the threshold without opening the gate. “This had better be worth the drive.”

“Good evening, Father.”

The silence that followed was intentional as I let the word hang there until it withered. “You don’t earn that title with a DNA test, Aaron. You earn it by being worth something. Try again when you are.”

Something moved behind his eyes before I could name it. But his smile remained.  “Caesar answers to that name,” he said. “And from what I’ve seen, he hasn’t exactly earned it lately.”

“Caesar is not your concern.”

“He’s been my concern my entire life.” The smile thinned slightly. “While I was growing up with a Mercer surname, wondering why my father’s name was on buildings I wasn’t allowed to enter, Caesar was living in this estate, going to the right schools and meeting the right people. He was being groomed for something I was never even told existed while I wasted away dealing with my alcoholic mother.”

“Your mother,” I said flatly, “was a woman who called me three months after the fact and made it very clear she’d considered her other options. You exist because she changed her mind. Don’t confuse that for a claim.”

Aaron’s jaw tightened and he looked like he wanted to hit me.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He straightened, and his posture shifted as the charm dropped just slightly, revealing what was underneath.

“Tomorrow’s board meeting,” he said. “I want a vote.”

“You have a seat—”

“I don’t want a seat. I want a vote.” He ground out. “And you’re going to give it to me, or I’m going to walk into that boardroom tomorrow and tell every person at that table exactly what you did to force Quinn Enterprises into compliance.”

I looked at him for a long moment. “You’re threatening me,” I said.

“I’m negotiating.” He tilted his head. “There’s a difference.”

“You’re overplaying your hand, Aaron.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged, a casual gesture that didn’t match the coldness in his eyes. “But I’d rather overplay it now than fold quietly like Caesar does.”

“You don’t take Caesar’s seat by lurking at my gates at midnight.”

“No,” he agreed. “I take it by being smarter than him. Which I am.” He paused, letting the hum of the night fill the space between us. “Speaking of Caesar… I had a long talk with Iris recently. Far too curious for her own good.”

He leaned in slightly. “She knows about the panic attacks, father.”

I kept my face still. I would not give him what he was looking for.

“I told her enough,” he continued, his voice dropping to a confidential near-whisper. “Enough to make her start asking questions she won’t stop asking. Your daughter-in-law isn’t quite the obedient little asset you bargained for, is she?”

“Have you lost your mind?” I asked sharply. “You told her.”

“I gave her a map.” He spread his hands. “What she digs up is her business. But we both know that the second Iris starts digging into Caesar’s history, she’s going to find yours. And once she finds yours—” He let the implication hang.

We stared at each other across the iron bars of the gate.

“A vote,” he said. “That’s the price. Give me a real seat at that table tomorrow, and everything stays buried.”

I looked at that Mercer face wearing Laurent ambition and felt a spark of genuine irritation. It was the closest I’d come to respecting him in twenty years.

“Caesar has always had a talent for emotion,” I said. “It makes him thorough, occasionally. But it also makes him slow.”

Aaron nodded. “I don’t have distractions. I just want the win.”

I gave him a final, dismissive look. “Go home. You’ll have your vote tomorrow.”

“And the other matter?” he called after me. “The things I know?”

I stopped and without giving him the satisfaction of looking back, I said, “If a single word of that leaves your mouth before I give the order, I’ll make sure you don’t need a surname at all. Because you won’t exist.”

The merger was just a day away and now I had three people I couldn’t fully control sitting under my roof.

I was almost at the entrance when Caesar rounded the corner.

He had earphones around his neck and a towel draped over his shoulder. Sweat soaked his shirt, clinging to his frame. He’d been running the perimeter—his usual ritual for a mind he couldn’t quiet.

He slowed when he saw me. His eyes went to the gate, then back to mine. “Where are you coming from?”

“I needed air,” I said. “A walk.”

He looked at me, measuring the distance between my words and the truth. I let him look.

“Come,” I said, matching his pace toward the front door. “I’ve been thinking. In times like these, it’s vital we stand together. You and I. We only have each other, Caesar.”

Caesar glanced down at the towel in his hand, twisting the fabric once. “We only have each other,” he repeated, the words sounding bitter. “You don’t have dementia, do you? Because last I checked, Aaron exists.”

“Aaron is a mistake.”

Caesar scoffed. “A mistake you use to threaten my position every time I step out of line.”

He looked at me then with a sudden, jarring clarity. “I’m heading in,” he said.

He walked past me without waiting for a reply and I watched the door swing shut behind him.

Interesting.

There is a difference between the silence of the obedient and the silence of the decided. That look was new. The son I raised did not grow resolve the way other men did. His grew in the dark, when no one was watching.

Which meant he’d been planning this long enough to get comfortable with the weight of it. I clasped my hands behind my back, disappointment creeping in.

A son who betrays is simply an asset that needs to be liquidated.