All Chapters of Rise to Power:
The Miraculous Liam Regan.: Chapter 201
- Chapter 210
218 chapters
Chapter 201
Penelope reached across and placed her hand briefly over her father's, the gesture quiet and deliberate, the kind of touch that is meant to slow someone down rather than comfort them."You need to calm down," she said, her voice steady and measured, carrying the particular authority of someone who is genuinely less frightened than the person they are speaking to. "It has not gotten to that point yet. Not yet. And I genuinely believe that before this day is fully over, we are going to have information, real information, that moves this situation forward." She held his gaze. "Liam is going to be fine. I am sure of it. You have nothing to worry about on that front."Nathaniel looked at her for a moment, something shifting in his expression between gratitude for her composure and frustration that she seemed to possess a certainty he could not locate in himself."Then what is making you angry?" he asked. "Because I can see it. You are not just worried. You are pissed. You are disgusted abo
Chapter 202
Penelope looked up from the screen the moment the phone began ringing, and something in her expression shifted, sharpened, the way a person looks when they have been waiting for a specific piece of information and the waiting is finally over."It is him," she said, almost to herself, already bringing the phone to her ear. "The person I sent the footage to."Nathaniel straightened in his chair, his full attention swinging toward his daughter, reading her face for information before a single word had been spoken.Penelope accepted the call."Tell me what you found," she said, skipping the pleasantries entirely, her voice clean and direct.The voice on the other end matched her energy without hesitation."I have gone through everything you sent me," he said, his tone carrying the particular confidence of someone who has done this enough times to be completely certain of their conclusions. "I have analyzed it thoroughly, frame by frame, metadata included, and here is what I can tell you."
Chapter 203
Nathaniel looked at her."You do not need to exhaust yourself over this," she said. "I will go to the hospital myself. I will handle it directly."Before she could finish the thought, Marcus's voice came back through the phone, quicker than before, a slight shift in its texture that was almost imperceptible but not quite."There is no need for that, Penelope," he said.But Nathaniel was no longer listening to his son's objections.He had pressed the phone more firmly against his ear, and something in his posture had changed, something in the set of his shoulders that suggested the conversation had just delivered something unexpected."I was not sitting idle before you called," Marcus continued, his voice regaining its composure. "I have been pushing on this from my end. The lawyers I contacted before this call gave me a response just shortly before you rang, actually a reasonable one. I am working on getting the full footage released through the proper legal channels, and I have been
Chapter 204
Penelope absorbed his words.She did not argue.She did not press further or lay out the additional threads of logic that were still weaving themselves together in her mind. She simply looked at her father for a moment with the quiet, patient expression of someone who has learned that certain conversations require more evidence before they can be had properly, and then she nodded."No problem," she said simply. "No problem at all."But the thought did not leave.It settled, instead, into a quieter place inside her, folding itself neatly away like a document that has been filed rather than discarded, waiting for the moment when it would become relevant again.She was drawing breath to say something else, to redirect the conversation toward the next practical step, when her phone vibrated against the desk.She looked down at the screen.And stopped.The expression that crossed her face was not fear exactly, and it was not simple surprise. It was something more complex than either of tho
Chapter 205
There was a moment of quiet on the other end.And then Liam spoke, and when he did, his voice carried something that Penelope did not immediately know how to categorize. It was not the voice of a man calling from a police cell. It was not the strained, careful voice of someone managing fear or exhaustion or the particular kind of psychological erosion that comes from hours of interrogation in a small room. It was relaxed. Unhurried. Entirely composed."You have nothing to worry about," he said simply. "But I do want to say thank you, genuinely, for the lawyers your father sent. That means a lot to me. However." A brief pause. "They will not be needed."Penelope blinked."What?""I have not seen them yet," Liam continued, the same even tone, the same unhurried delivery. "But I wanted to call, first of all, to apologize for not coming back yesterday. That was remiss of me and I should have called sooner. I was released yesterday evening, actually. Quite early in the evening. I had every
Chapter 206
The room that had been buzzing with anxiety and investigation and unanswered questions for the better part of the morning settled into a brief, suspended quiet.Penelope lowered the phone from her ear slowly and turned to find her father already watching her, his eyes carrying the expression she had seen on his face many times over the years in moments when reality had failed to behave in the way he had expected it to.He spoke in a low voice."Do not tell me," he said, "that he was released.""Yesterday," Penelope said. "Not even this morning. He was released yesterday evening. He said he got caught up with something urgent and lost track of the time, and he is calling now to apologize for not coming back when he said he would."The silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the one that had existed before the call.Nathaniel stood in the middle of the study and stared at his daughter, and the expression moving across his face cycled through several distinct stages wi
Chapter 207
The question hung in the air between them, patient and immovable, the way only a father's question can hang, carrying within it not just the request for information but the full accumulated weight of years of attention, of watching, of knowing someone from the very first moment of their existence and understanding, on some cellular level, when they are holding something back.Penelope looked at her father.And in the space of the few seconds that followed, she ran through the full calculation with the speed and precision of someone who has been quietly preparing for this exact moment without fully admitting to herself that it was coming.She thought about what she knew.She thought about the specific nature of what she knew, the texture of it, the implications of it, the way certain information, once spoken aloud in the wrong room to the wrong person at the wrong time, becomes impossible to contain. She thought about her father, about his particular brand of intelligence, the way he p
Chapter 208
Nathaniel straightened and allowed himself a long, slow breath."I am very thankful," he said finally, and the words came from somewhere genuine, somewhere beneath the strategy and the questions and the morning's accumulated tension. "I am genuinely, deeply thankful that this ended the way it did. That it did not go further, that it did not become something worse, that we are sitting here this morning having this conversation instead of a much harder one." He shook his head slightly. "Very thankful.""As am I," Penelope said softly.She held his gaze for one more moment, and in that moment there was a conversation that passed between them that used no words at all, the particular silent exchange that is only possible between two people who know each other well enough to communicate in the space between sentences.Then she picked up her bag, settled it against her shoulder, and moved toward the door with the clean, decisive movement of someone who has said everything they intend to say
Chapter 209
Nathaniel looked at him for a moment."There is no need," he said quietly.Marcus blinked. A single, fractional disruption in his composure, gone almost before it arrived."I am sorry?""The footage," Nathaniel said. "There is no need to pursue it any further. The situation has changed."Marcus stood very still."Changed how?" he said, and his voice carried exactly the right amount of genuine curiosity, exactly the right balance between confusion and attentiveness."Liam has been released," Nathaniel said simply, watching his son's face as he delivered the information.What happened next was interesting.Marcus was good. He had always been good at controlling his expressions, at managing the presentation of his inner life to the people around him, and in most circumstances, in the vast majority of situations he had encountered over the course of his life, that skill served him extremely well.But this was not most circumstances.The information that Liam had been released, not this mo
Chapter 210
The car door had barely closed behind him before Marcus's composure shattered.It did not crack gradually, the way composure sometimes does under sustained pressure, giving a person time to notice the fracture and attempt repairs. It simply collapsed, all at once, the entire carefully maintained structure of it falling away the moment the door sealed him inside the private darkness of the vehicle and there was no one left to perform for.His right fist connected with the steering wheel.Then his left.Then his right again, harder, the impact reverberating up through his wrist and forearm in a way that was almost satisfying in its physicality, almost adequate as an outlet for the thing that was building inside his chest with nowhere else to go."How?" he said, his voice raw and unguarded in a way it never was inside that house, inside any room that contained another human being. "How did he get away from this? How?"He hit the steering wheel again.The plan had been careful. He needed