Chapter 244 Just A Liability

Chapter 244 Just A Liability
Chapter Two Hundred And Forty\-Two

Nathan’s car moved up the ramp and out of the garage.

It drove into the evening traffic of the financial district, and he sat in the back and looked out the window and said nothing for several minutes.

He had dismissed her.

He had dismissed her efficiently and correctly and with the appropriate amount of force, and he did not regret it.

He had meant every word of what he had said.

Clara Beaumont was not a useful partner.

She was a liability in a coat, a woman whose name was currently attached to a courtroom video that had been viewed by a number of people that precluded any kind of operational discretion, and who had apparently spent four days hiding in a parking garage in order to accost him in his own vehicle, which was not a characteristic associated with competent people.

He had been right to dismiss her.

He sat in the car and watched the city go past and told himself this.

The problem was that she had not been wrong.

She had been entirely wrong about everything else, about her approach and her usefulness and her capacity to be any kind of meaningful partner in anything.

But the thing she had said, the substance of it underneath all the inappropriate delivery, had not been wrong.

Aria Beaumont was winning.

She had been winning for months and the wins were compounding with the specific momentum of a person who had gotten something moving and was now riding it rather than pushing it.

The Beaumont Empire restructuring had given her a platform. The Nexus project had given her a reputation. The Rainbow Corridor deal had given her evidence. The evidence had given her the arrests. The arrests had given her the trust authentication and the chairmanship and the public story.

And the public story.

Nathan had been following the coverage with the particular attention of a man who knew himself to be adjacent to the events being covered and was tracking what was becoming visible and what was not.

He had been spying on the comments sections.

He did not often read comments sections.

He had always regarded them as the noise produced by people with no meaningful stake in the outcomes being discussed.

But he had read them over the past weeks because the comments sections were where the public’s understanding of the situation was being formed, and the public’s understanding of the situation was a thing that had the potential to matter to him.

What he had found in the comments sections was not reassuring.

The comments about Aria were the comments of people who had decided she was someone to root for, which was the most durable and most dangerous kind of public support.

It was not the support of spectacle, which faded when the spectacle moved on.

It was the support of identification, people who saw in her story something they wanted to believe about what was possible, and that kind of support did not fade.

The comments about Lucian were the comments of people who had decided the couple together were something to admire, which was its own additional problem.

The comments about the Graves Empire were almost uniformly positive in a way that he found personally uncomfortable, because the Graves Empire’s positive public standing was in direct contrast to the position he had been attempting to build for himself within it for the better part of a decade.

He thought about himself and his position in the Empire.

His prominence and authority in the company was deteriorating.

And there was something else.

There was this underlying anxiety he felt every damn single day. He did not know what to make of it, or why it even came about in the firsts place.

He did not know if it was because of Aria’s success in the past few months or the fact that his relationship with the Chairman was not looking good, or the fact that Lucian was riding the coat tails of his wife’s success and that was putting him in more favour with the Chairman.

“What if the Chairman decides to retire and hands everything over to him?” He thought

Immediately, his jaw became taut with that same anxiety, and the knot of his tie around his neck suddenly became too tight. He yanked at it furiously, breathing hard through his nose.

“No, I cannot let that happen.” He through, gritting his teeth, “No matter what, I have to get it! The Graves Empire is mine!”

He sat in the car and thought about this with the focused attention of a man who had been thinking about it for weeks and had not yet arrived at a satisfactory plan and was aware that the window for a satisfactory plan was closing.

He thought about what Clara had said.

She'd asked if he was just going to sit and let Aria take away everything from everyone who should be ahead of her.

He had dismissed her because she was not useful and because the specific shape of what she was proposing, a partnership between two exposed people in a parking garage, was absurd.

But the question underneath her question was one he had been asking himself for weeks.

What was he going to do?

He had not, if he was honest with himself in the way that the particular quality of the evening traffic and his own isolation in the back of the car permitted, have a plan.

He had feelings.

He had significant feelings, the accumulated resentment of months of watching someone he had underestimated, outmaneuver everyone around her and continue to ascend while the structures he had been building for years showed their own cracks.

He had the specific rage, that specific rage of someone who'd done a careful and serious harm to Lucian Graves three years ago and was now watching that thing become a liability rather than an asset.

He had feelings.

He did not have a plan.

He stared out the window.

The traffic moved around the car with the indifferent efficiency of a city going about the end of its business day, and Nathan sat in the back of his company car.

He needed a plan