From Valet to billionaire king

Thrown out at last

For a moment nobody moved.

Edmund looked at the two men in the doorway, broad-shouldered and expressionless, clearly not there to discuss anything, and felt something in his chest go very still and very cold. It was the particular calm that comes before a decision you already know you cannot win your way out of.

"Rosalind." He kept his voice quiet, not taking his eyes off the men. "Come with me. Now."

She grabbed his hand, but before either of them could move toward the door, Barnaby's voice cut across the room, sharp as a blade.

"Rosalind stays."

"She's my wife," Edmund said. "She's leaving with me."

"She's my daughter," Barnaby said, "in my house, and she stays until this is settled." He turned to the men, and something ugly flickered at the corner of his mouth. "Get him out. I don't much care how."

"Don't touch him." Rosalind stepped between Edmund and the men, arms spread as if she could hold back two grown men through sheer will. "Don't you dare touch him."

"Rosalind." Cordelia's voice, cold and commanding. "Step aside."

"No." Rosalind's voice broke on the word, tears streaming, but she didn't move. "I'm not going to stand here and watch you throw my husband out of a house like he's nothing. Like he's furniture you don't want anymore."

"He is nothing," Barnaby said, and the flat cruelty in his voice landed harder than anything he'd said all night. "He was nothing when you married him, and three years of parking cars hasn't changed that. I let this go on because I loved you more than I trusted my own judgment. That ends tonight."

The larger of the two men didn't wait for Edmund to move on his own. He seized Edmund's arm and wrenched it up hard behind his back, hard enough that Edmund's breath left him in a sharp, involuntary grunt.

"Move," the man said, no apology in it at all this time, and shoved him toward the hallway.

Edmund stumbled, his shoulder scraping the doorframe, pain flaring white and sudden up through his arm. The second man closed in from the other side, a hand fisted hard in the back of Edmund's collar, and between the two of them they drove him forward faster than his own feet could keep up with, his shoes skidding on the hardwood.

"Stop it!" Rosalind's scream tore through the room. "You're hurting him! Dad, tell them to stop!"

"Rosalind." He said her name like a promise. "I'm not leaving you here. I'll figure this out. I love you."

"Edmund!" Her voice cracked into a sob as the second man moved to her father's side, not touching her, just present, a wall between her and the door.

"Let him go, Rosalind," Barnaby said, watching the whole thing with no more concern than a man watching someone else's furniture get moved. "He's already gone."

The men hauled Edmund down the front hallway at a pace that left him no room to find his footing, his arm still twisted up behind him, his collar biting into his throat. At the threshold, the larger man planted a boot against the small of his back and shoved.

Edmund pitched forward off the top step and hit the wet stone path hard, his palms scraping raw as he caught himself, pain lancing up through his wrist. He looked back in time to see Rosalind's face crumbling as her mother's hand closed around her wrist, holding her in place, and Aldous Vane rising from his chair with the unhurried satisfaction of a man watching an outcome he had expected all along.

"You'll thank us eventually," Aldous said, stepping into the doorway just long enough to watch. "Sometimes people need help seeing what's good for them."

Edmund didn't answer. He got to his feet slowly, wrist throbbing, and didn't trust his voice not to break, and refused to give any of them that.

The front door closed behind him with a heavy, final click. Edmund stood alone on the steps of a house that had never once welcomed him, rain starting again in the dark, his palms stinging, his shoulder aching where it had been wrenched. He could still hear Rosalind's voice through the walls, raised now, pleading, her mother's voice sharp over it, and beneath both, Barnaby's voice, low and immovable, laying down terms Edmund couldn't make out from the street.

He tried the door. Locked. He knocked hard, three times, and got nothing back but silence, the voices inside going quiet as if the house itself had swallowed them.

He stood there a long time, soaked through again, staring at a door that wasn't going to open, trying to decide whether to call the police, whether that would help Rosalind or make everything worse, whether there was anyone in this world who could do a single thing about a rich man's wife locked inside a rich man's house.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He almost didn't answer, his hands shaking too hard to think straight, until he saw the name on the screen and something in him went still.

**UNCLE PERCIVAL**

Percival didn't call. Percival sent emails through three layers of assistants and treated a phone call as a personal indulgence he rarely allowed himself. Edmund hadn't seen that name light up his phone in three years.

He answered, voice rough. "Uncle Percival."

The voice on the other end was clipped, urgent, older than Edmund remembered it. "Edmund. Thank God I reached you. I need you to sit down."

"I'm standing outside in the rain," Edmund said, "and I've had about the worst night of my life already, so whatever this is, please just say it."

There was a pause, and when Percival spoke again his voice had dropped into something gentler and much graver.

"Your father is dead, Edmund"