Chapter 249 No Connection
Chapter 249 No Connection
Chapter Two Hundred And Forty-Six
She flashed Nathan a scathing look, “And even if I did go down, what on earth am I supposed to say to the Chairman?! You think he’d ever listen to me?!”
Nathan took in a deep breath, then let it out shakily.
He told her everything then.
He told her about the news alert.
About the retirement announcement.
About the six-week timeline. He told her in the flat, stripped-down language of a man who was past the point of managing how information landed and was simply delivering it.
Monica listened without interrupting.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
She was not the kind of woman who panicked easily, so she flanked down hard on the panic bubbling up in her chest.
It was one of the things he had relied on in her over the years, the specific steadiness she maintained in the face of bad news, which was the steadiness not of someone who was unaffected but of someone who moved through the feeling and into the practical implication with functional speed.
She was moving through it now.
He could see it in the particular quality of her stillness.
“Six weeks,” she said.
“That’s right,” he confirmed, “Sox weeks”
“After which Lucian is chairman.”
Nathan was silent, letting the weight of those words sit heavy on his shoulders.
Monica looked at him steadily.
He looked back at her and waited for the version of what she was going to say that she had settled on.
She said, “We need them gone.”
He said nothing.
“Both of them,” she said. “Lucian and Aria. As long as they are in the picture, we have no position. We have no inheritance. We have no protection when Adam’s situation moves to us.” She paused. “But if they were gone….”
“The succession reverts,” Nathan whispered in awe.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “To the next available family position, To us.”
Nathan savored this thought quietly.
He had thought about versions of it the night before in the bar, and those versions had had the soft, uncertain quality of thinking done under alcohol.
What Monica was saying now had the different quality of a woman who had arrived at the same place through a different route and was stating it with the precision of a conclusion rather than a possibility.
“Lucian was the one who had the right family claim,” Nathan said.
“Not anymore,” Monica said flatly.
He looked at her.
She looked back at him.
“We need them gone,” she said again.
Simply.
Finally.
The way one said things that had been true for a while and were now being said out loud for the first time.
He thought about the night before.
He thought about the bar and the clarity and the decision that had been forming before he was aware he was making it.
He thought about what “gone” required.
He thought about three years ago, about Lucian on that highway,
He thought about the truck he’d put in place and the specific mechanics of a thing that had been arranged with that man back then…
What was his name again?
Sylvan Dray.
Sylvan Dray, and his network and the company he had used and the particular way the brakes on a car could be made to fail on a specific route at a specific time.
It had worked.
It had worked completely, in fact.
Lucian had been in that bed for three years.
The only variable he had not accounted for had been the woman who walked in and touched him and woke him up, which was a variable that no reasonable plan could have been expected to include.
He thought about using the same method.
He thought about the company he had used.
Helix Freight, the operational arm that Dray had provided for the logistics of the thing, the truck and the route and the timing.
He thought about calling Dray.
Yes, that seems like the most probable plan.
“I can arrange it,” he said.
Monica looked at him, pleasure flashing in her eyes at those words.
“The same way as before,” Nathan continued. “The route. The vehicle. The brakes.” He paused. “They use a car together most evenings. The Graves company car. The route from Graves Tower to the residential district is established and predictable.”
“It needs to be clean,” Monica said.
“It was clean before,” he reiterated, shrugging nonchalantly.
“It put him in a hospital bed for three years,” Monica insisted, looking disgusted.. “This time, it needs to be more certain. I need the best job this time, Nathan.”
Nathan nodded, looking at her with a half smirk.
She looked back at him with the calm of a woman who had been waiting for this conversation and had arrived at her own conclusions about its requirements before he came through the door.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s more certain this time,” he assured her.
“Yes,” she said.
He thought about the truck.
About what “more certain” meant in the mechanics of what he was describing.
He thought about Dray, and his lips stretched further into a full devilish smile.
Calmly, he reached for his phone, and looked up Dray’s contact.
He had the number stored under a name that meant nothing on the outside but was actually a pseudonym for occasions like this.
It was one of several such contacts in his phone that existed under neutral designations for the purpose of this kind of discretion.
He had used it once, three years ago, to make the initial connection, and had not used it since because the nature of the arrangement was that you used it when you needed it and did not use it when you did not.
But he still kept it, under that pseudonym, for future use.
Now was the time.
He pressed call.
The number rang.
It rang again.
On the third ring, the call connected, but not in the way a call usually connected.
There was the connection and then there was a recording, the automated message of a number that had been disconnected or decommissioned.
It was the specific flat tone of a line that was no longer active.
Nathan stared at his phone, his brows furrowing in a tight frown.