All Chapters of RISE OF THE FORSAKEN SON-IN-LAW: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
12 chapters
Chapter 1
The interview lasted for eleven minutes.Oliver Marlowe counted them on the white clock above the interviewer's shoulder. It was a habit from years of waiting in rooms where no one wanted him lingering. All he got was a whole 11 minutes that served him a fake handshake, and the specific brand of polite smile that meant the answer was no before he had taken his seat.He walked home by passing through Kensington High Street with his tie loosened and the persistent October drizzle darkening his already weak shoulders. The offer of a cab, which he could not afford, didn't even cross his mind.The walk was forty minutes. He had made it before.The Voss home was Georgian-fronted and looked very luxurious, its black railings freshly painted with its steps freshly scrubbed. Oliver hesitated at the doorstep as he always did. It wasn't from shyness, but from the thought of what waited for him inside. Then without thinking further, he pushed the door open.Clarissa was on the chesterfield with h
Chapter 2
He prepares lunch with a lot of care and this time was the same. He was cooking a proper cold chicken and leek pie wrapped in greaseproof paper, inside a small pot of dressed salad, and some shortbread biscuits from the tin on the counter. He had been making really thoughtful foods for Clarissa since the beginning, but she had suddenly stopped collecting his food from the front desk three months into their marriage. He didn't mind though and continued making anyway, for reasons he could not entirely defend.He had been to her office twice before. The security staff at the Hale-Mortimer building remembered his face and waved him to come in. He entered the fourteenth floor with the cold aluminium of the lift doors at his back. His heart beating at a speed he refused to accept.Clarissa's office wasn't far. It was at the corner. Her window blinds were lowered, but they had not been on his former visits. He told himself this meant nothing. He walked the last twenty feet and pushed the d
Chapter 3
19 Years Earlier Inside a dark room smelling of cigarettes was a little boy of 10 years. He was sat with his wrists bound behind him, and a cloth across his eyes, while he listened to men argue about money. He was being a very quiet boy because one of the men had warned him that quiet children were safer children. He got scared enough so he kept his mouth shut and tried to not make a single sound. The telephone call had been made. He could hear only one half of it, the men's half, but he understood enough."Ten million pounds," the lead man said. "You have it. We know you have it."A pause. Whatever came through the line made the man laugh in a way that had no warmth in it at all."He says he has another son," the man reported to his associates. The room went quiet.The boy heard this and understood it too, in the way that children understand things that adults assume will pass over them. He did not cry immediately. He waited until the man had ended the call, and then he cried becau
Chapter 4
Oliver's phone rang as the Rolls-Royce carried him back across the city. He looked at the screen: Clarissa.He let it ring twice more, then answered."Where are you?" she asked."Out.""Geoffrey is asking questions. He wants to speak with you. If you come back tonight and explain things properly, I will tell Mother to be civil." A pause. "And there may be a position at Hale-Mortimer that Dominic could arrange. A junior analyst role. You would--"He ended the call.Edmund, who had politely looked out his window, said nothing."She is offering me a junior role," Oliver said, "at the company of the man she was sleeping with.""Human audacity," Edmund said, in the tone of a man cataloguing a natural phenomenon, "continues to exceed my expectations."Oliver almost smiled. It was the first time in hours that his face had considered it.He signed the transfer documents properly at Edmund's solicitor's office the following morning -- a Georgian townhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields where everythi
Chapter 5
Ashworth Continental Hotels occupied a glass-and-limestone tower near Canary Wharf, its lobby a study in muted luxury that someone had designed with confidence and then allowed to quietly date over the following decade. The plants in the atrium needed attention. The carpet in the executive lift was a year past replacement. Oliver noted these things with the automatic precision of someone who has spent years making other people's spaces look acceptable on no budget.The operations director was a man called Hadley, early fifties, with the careful posture of someone carrying more stress than the salary justified. He walked Oliver to the executive floor and presented three years of reports with the expression of a doctor delivering a prognosis.Oliver read in silence. The numbers were not catastrophic. They were, more troublingly, mediocre -- the kind of decline that happens when nothing fails dramatically and nothing succeeds at all, when a company mistakes the absence of crisis for heal
Chapter 6
The restaurant was called Braise, and it occupied a narrow Georgian building near Berkeley Square -- warm-lit, low-ceilinged, improbably intimate for a kitchen that produced food of that calibre. Oliver arrived two minutes early. He was shown to a corner table by a young man who moved with the focused efficiency of someone trained by someone exacting, and he sat and read the menu and waited.Stella Laurent arrived two minutes late, which he suspected was intentional.She was taller than he had expected, which was an unfair expectation to have had, and she moved through the restaurant with the specific ease of someone who owns the room not by assertion but by familiarity. Dark hair pulled back. A chef's double-breasted jacket traded for a well-cut linen shirt. She glanced at the menu as she sat down, as though checking it had been presented correctly."I did not change anything," he said.She looked at him. "I know. I was checking that Henri seated you at the right table. He sometimes
Chapter 7
Sebastian moved in the way of men who learned early that charm could substitute for character: fluidly, confidently, with enough surface warmth to delay the recognition of what was underneath. He appeared in Oliver's office on a Wednesday afternoon without an appointment, carrying two cups of coffee from the good place downstairs, and smiled with the ease of a man who has never had to work for his smile."Brother," he said. "I thought we should talk."Oliver looked at the coffee. "I prefer tea.""I will remember that. How are you settling in?""Fine.""The staff seem impressed. I hear the board meeting went well." He examined the room with apparent casualness, his eyes cataloguing. "I wanted to say -- I may have been cold at dinner. That was not fair of me. I was surprised."Oliver waited."I think we should work together," Sebastian continued. "You have been away a long time. I know this company, I know the family networks, I know who can be trusted and who--""Who cannot be trusted?
Chapter 8
Edmund's report on Sebastian arrived at six-fifteen in the morning and ran to forty-seven pages.Oliver read it at the kitchen table with a pot of tea, the house quiet around him. Outside, the Richmond garden was damp and grey in the early light, the lime trees beginning to turn. He read without hurrying, making notes in the margin in a small, precise hand.Sebastian had, over the preceding three years, diverted approximately two point three million pounds from the Ashworth Group's secondary development fund into a private vehicle registered in Luxembourg. The vehicle had no declared purpose. It had made two substantial payments: one to a private security consultancy with a limited Companies House filing, and one -- recent, six weeks prior -- to an individual Oliver did not yet recognise.He set the report down and drank his tea."Edmund," he said, when the butler appeared in the doorway with a second cup. "The private security consultancy on page thirty-one. I need to know who they w
Chapter 9
The honeymoon lasted four days, which was Stella's idea and Oliver's relief.She had a restaurant to run. He had a company in the early stages of something that required attention the way a new fire requires attention — not constant, but regular, and never fully trusted. They spent those four days in a rented farmhouse twenty minutes from the wedding village, ate well, slept well, and argued productively about the hotel culinary programme on the second afternoon until they found themselves in agreement and then slightly at a loss for what to do with the silence.On the fifth day they drove back to London.Oliver returned to the office on a Monday to find Hadley waiting with three things, in descending order of urgency: a letter from the Castellan Hotels group, a request for comment from a financial journalist at the Financial Times, and a revised set of occupancy projections for the first quarter.He read the projections first. They were up six percent across the portfolio — modest, b
Chapter 10
Stella found the first offer from Lumière Group on a Thursday, tucked inside an envelope that had been forwarded from her accountant's office and then left in the morning stack without particular flag. She read it twice, set it on the kitchen counter, made coffee, and read it a third time.Then she called Oliver."Lumière have made an approach," she said. "For Braise."A brief silence. "How substantial?""Substantial enough to have been researched. They know the revenue. They know the staff structure." She took her coffee to the window. Outside, the Mayfair street was beginning to move with the particular slow energy of late morning. "They want the name, the concept, and a consultancy agreement for four years. They were polite about it and there was nothing behind the politeness.""What do you want to do?""I want to know who they spoke to.""Yes," Oliver said. "So do I."She could hear him thinking in the quality of the silence — the focused, unhurried kind of thinking that she had c