Chapter 248 No Bother
Chapter 248 No Bother
Chapter Two Hundred And Forty-Five
Nathan stared at the screen, disbelief etched on his face.
In an instant, it morphed into rage.
“Rargggh!” He screamed as he chucked the phone across the room. The cell phone hit the wall opposite and shattered into smithereens.
He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard and ignoring the pounding headache at the base of his head.
He had known this was coming in the abstract.
He had known it the way a person knew things that one has placed in the category of future problems but has not fully confronted it.
Lucian’s recovery….
His return to the company…
His gradual resumption of his operational role…
All of these had been pointing in this direction.
But knowing it was coming and reading it in a news outlet on a morning after a night in a bar was a different experience.
Six weeks.
In six weeks, Lucian Graves would be the formal, official, confirmed chairman of the Graves Empire.
Which meant, Nathan thought, his head pounding and the morning light pressing through the curtains with the specific unkindness of light on a headache, that whatever Nathan had been building toward in his years of proximity to the chairman…
Whatever position he had been engineering, whatever inheritance of influence he had been accumulating through loyalty and proximity and the particular careful management of the old man’s preferences, was finished.
The chairman, his father, had never been his target.
His target had been the moment of transition.
The gap between the old chairman and the new one, the period of uncertainty and reconfiguration in which an illegitimate son can become something more than an illegitimate existence.
He had been counting on that gap.
He had been counting, specifically, on Lucian Graves being too damaged by the accident and too recently recovered to step into the role with full capability, which would create a longer and more navigable transition period.
But Lucian was not damaged.
Lucian had recovered with the specific completeness of a man who had something to recover for, and he had been in the building for months performing at a level that left no room for the gap Nathan had been planning around.
Aria Beaumont, who had apparently arrived in this world specifically to ruin Nathan’s calculations, had been beside him through all of it, and was beside him now, and would be beside him in six weeks when he sat at the head of the Graves Empire board and the gap closed permanently.
Nathan’s assistant knocked and entered with the discretion of someone who had been told to check on him and was performing the task with appropriate caution.
He was a young man named Pei, efficient and quiet, and he confirmed what Nathan had read in the outlet with the additional detail of having called the Graves house directly that morning to verify.
Yes, the chairman had made the announcement.
Yes, the shareholder meeting was confirmed for six weeks’ time.
Yes, the succession was formally scheduled.
Nathan thanked him and told him to leave.
He sat on the bed in his coat in the mid-morning light and held his phone and looked at the confirmed end of everything he had built for the past decade.
He thought about what he had been thinking the night before.
He thought about it more clearly now than he had thought about it in the bar, without the alcohol but with the specific focus that comes from a man who has woken up to find his situation materially worse than it was when he went to sleep.
He thought about the landscape without Lucian and Aria in it.
He thought about six weeks.
He thought about what needed to happen in those six weeks for the landscape to look the way he needed it to look.
He put his phone in his coat pocket, and then went out of the room in search of his wife.
He needed to talk to her.
“Monica!” He called as he burst into her bedroom, taking long strides across the large space, “Monica!”
Where the fuck was she?!
He turned and stalked out of the room, his eyes and movements frantic.
He stormed into the sitting room, and his eyes landed on his wife.
Monica was in the sitting room when he came through the door, and the quality of her silence when she saw him was the silence of a woman who had prepared several versions of what she was going to say and was selecting between them based on his appearance.
His appearance, he understood from her expression, was not reassuring.
“Monica, what happened?” He asked, breathing hard, “Were you here when the Chairman announced his retirement?!”
Monica had her eyes closed, her features seemingly calm but tensed.
She said nothing about the night or the bar or the seven messages.
At his question, she slowly opened her eyes and glared at him, “Sit.”
Nathan was fuming but he obliged, sitting down on one of the plush sofas strewn across the living room.
She sat across from him and looked at him with the focused attention she brought to things she was taking seriously.
“Tell me,” she said coldly.
“Tell you what?” Nathan snarled back at her.
“For God’s sake, tell me your fucking plans, Nathan!” Monica pressed on, stressing out each word with pretentious calmness.
Nathan wanted to tell, to scream at her and tell her that he’d gotten no plans yet.
He wanted to yell that, this was the reason why he was looking for her in the first place, to see if she had any smart ideas up her sleeve.
But he held his tongue, swallowing hard.
“Where were you last night as well?” He asked instead, through gritted teeth, “What did the Chairman say exactly? And you couldn’t even try to say something?!”
“I did not go down for dinner last night,” Monica shot back at him, “How nice of you to go on a drinking spree and abandon your wife with those vultures for hours!”
The memory of the night before replayed over and over in her head.
Seeing that Nathan was not at the house, Monica had decided not to go down herself. To her chagrin and bitterness, nobody came up to try to persuade her to join them.
She had thought they would be sending in their requests for her and Nathan to come down but the rest of the family partied all night, without bothering to even check the south wing.