All Chapters of WORTHLESS SON-IN-LAW IS THE KING OF DYNASTY : Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
21 chapters
Chapter 1
"Another door closed," Lucas murmured to himself, loosening the top button of his shirt as he turned off the Rue de Rivoli and walked toward the Beaumont townhouse. The collar had begun to chafe somewhere around midday, when the interview panel had thanked him for his time in the particular tone reserved for candidates they would not be calling back.He had prepared for six weeks. He had researched the firm's portfolio, modelled three years of projected growth, and rehearsed his answers so thoroughly that they had begun to feel less like responses and more like recitations. None of it had mattered. Somewhere between his surname — unremarkable — and his address — the Beaumont residence, recognisable to anyone in Paris's social strata as a comfortable but distinctly unfashionable postcode — the panel had already made their decision.He stopped at the gate and stood there for a moment, looking at the cream-painted façade of the building that was not his home. The brass knocker. The box h
Chapter 2
He went to Olivier Marchand's office building the next morning. He had found the name easily enough — Céleste's phone, left unlocked on the bathroom counter while she showered, told a story that required very little interpretation. The building was in the 8th arrondissement, a glass-and-steel tower that expressed wealth without charm, which seemed appropriate.He did not go inside immediately. He stood across the street with a café crème he wasn't drinking, watching the lobby through plate glass, wondering if he was wrong, hoping he was wrong, knowing he wasn't.He crossed the street. Spoke to the receptionist. Said he was there to deliver something personal for his wife, Céleste Beaumont, who he believed was in a meeting with Monsieur Marchand — he smiled apologetically as he said it, the smile of a slightly hapless husband with a forgotten anniversary gift. The receptionist, bless her, took him straight up.The office was on the fourteenth floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of
Chapter 3
Flashback — Fifteen Years Earlier, Paris, 14th ArrondissementThe apartment had smelled of turpentine and old paper, which was how it always smelled when his mother was working. She was a restorationist — patient, methodical, capable of extraordinary attention to something that most people would have discarded as beyond saving. Lucas, fourteen years old, sitting at the kitchen table with his homework spread around him, had always found it a comfort: the idea that damaged things could be returned to what they had been.His father was in the next room, speaking on the phone in the low, careful voice that meant the conversation was important and the outcome was not certain.Lucas had not been meant to hear what followed. The walls in that apartment were thin, and his father's voice, however carefully modulated, had a carrying quality. He heard fragments. The estate. The succession. The question of whether Lucas — named at his mother's insistence, over Henri's objections, for a great-uncl
Chapter 4
His phone rang at seven-fifteen the next morning. He was already awake, dressed, standing at the window of the room Sébastien had shown him to — a corner room with a view of the terraced gardens and, beyond them, the pale beginning of the sea — and looking at the documents he had read three times already.He looked at the screen. Céleste.He answered."Where are you?" Her voice was strange — not quite concerned, not quite demanding. Somewhere in between. The voice of someone recalibrating."Not in Paris.""My father has been asking for you. He wants some kind of — I don't know, debrief, I suppose. About the divorce. He thinks you should come and discuss it properly so there are no complications.""There won't be complications. The papers were clean.""Lucas." A pause. The rain in Paris, audible faintly through the phone. "I know things weren't perfect. I know I wasn't — but you could have said something. You could have tried harder to — "He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked
Chapter 5
The morning briefing with the department heads went the way Lucas had hoped: honestly. He had learned, somewhere in three years of being treated as peripheral, that people will tell you almost everything if they believe you are genuinely listening rather than simply waiting for an opportunity to speak.The head of housekeeping — a composed woman named Brigitte who had been at the hotel for eleven years — told him about the three floors that had been locked off due to a water damage issue that had not been properly remediated. The food and beverage manager told him about the kitchen equipment that had been on a request list for two years. The front of house manager, the youngest of them and the most nervous, said very quietly that the online review scores had been declining because guests kept describing the hotel as 'fine,' which was, in his estimation, the worst thing a hotel could be."Fine means forgettable," Lucas agreed. "So we make it unforgettable. Not by adding things — by fin
Chapter 6
Édouard Moreau arrived in Paris four days after Lucas did. Lucas knew this because Sébastien told him, in the quiet, even-toned way that Sébastien delivered all information that was designed to be a warning without presenting itself as one."He has requested a meeting with the board of the hospitality group," Sébastien said. "To discuss the question of succession and whether the transfer was conducted in compliance with the family charter.""Was it?""Completely. Your grandfather's instructions were unambiguous and properly documented." A pause. "That won't stop Édouard from raising the question.""Let him raise it." Lucas was reading the three-year financial summary of the Montparnasse hotel, making small marks in the margin. "If he wants to challenge a legal transfer in open board proceedings, he's welcome to. The proceedings will be public record."Sébastien looked at him. "You'd prefer it to be public.""I'd prefer the board to see, on record, that the first thing Édouard did when
Chapter 7
Édouard came to see him not in a boardroom but in the hotel lobby, unannounced, on a Tuesday morning when the building was full of the controlled activity of a renovation beginning to take shape. The courtyard was being cleared. The locked floors were receiving fresh air for the first time in two years. Brigitte had hired back two members of staff who had left during the interim period and described the resulting team morale as "beginning to resemble something human."Édouard was younger than Lucas had expected — though he'd known the age, 26 somehow feels different in person from 26 on a file. He had the looks of the Moreau side: the amber eyes, the jaw, the quality of being comfortable in expensive rooms. He also had the particular energy of someone who has spent a long time being the most important person in a space and has recently discovered that this is no longer guaranteed."Cousin," he said. The word had a blade under it."Édouard." Lucas shook the offered hand. He had been ex
Chapter 8
The board challenge was dismissed on a Wednesday morning, in a glass-walled room on the eighth floor of the Moreau Group's administrative offices on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Lucas was not present for the vote. He had been advised by Sébastien that his presence would be interpreted — by the board members who were still calibrating their loyalties — as either anxiety or aggression, and he intended to project neither.He spent that Wednesday at the hotel instead, in the courtyard that was not yet a courtyard, watching two workmen carefully dismantle the concrete ramp that had been poured over the original cobblestones sometime in the mid-nineties. Beneath it, emerging slab by slab in the pale October light, were the original stones — uneven, frost-cracked in places, but unmistakably there.His phone rang at eleven-fourteen. Sébastien."Seven in favour, one abstention. The challenge is dismissed and entered into the permanent record." A pause. "Édouard voted for himself.""Who ab
Chapter 9
Lucas did not move for a long time after underlining Clause 14, Sub-article C.The room was quiet in the way only expensive hotel suites manage to be quiet — insulated, deliberate, as though even sound had been negotiated. Outside, Paris continued its indifferent rhythm: distant traffic, the occasional siren, the muted life of a city that never paused long enough to acknowledge individual revelations.He read the clause again.Suspension of the advisory role of any family member engaged in actions materially contrary to the group’s operational interests.It was not decorative language. It was functional. Sharp. Old legal phrasing, the kind that had survived because it had already been tested.Lucas leaned back slowly in his chair.“Of course,” he murmured.It wasn’t admiration. It was recognition.The Moreau dynasty had not lasted because it was kind. It had lasted because, at some point, someone had built self-preservation mechanisms into its bones.And now those mechanisms were his.
Chapter 10
The courtyard smelled of fresh gravel and damp stone on the morning of the reopening. Lucas stood at the edge of the restored space with his hands in his pockets, watching two of Brigitte’s team arrange the last of the iron café chairs. The plane trees had been pruned with surgical care, their leaves still holding the deep green of late summer. Sunlight filtered through in quiet shafts, catching on the uneven surface of the original cobblestones.It was not yet perfect. A few patches of moss still clung stubbornly between the stones, and one of the benches needed another coat of oil. But it felt honest. That mattered more.Brigitte approached from the service door, clipboard in hand, her expression the careful neutrality of someone who had learned not to hope too loudly.“The last delivery arrived,” she said. “The glassware for the terrace service. And the florist confirmed white peonies for the tables, as you requested.”Lucas nodded. “No arrangements. Just single stems in the small