RISE OF THE FORSAKEN SON-IN-LAW

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 because there was nothing else to do.

It was a second man, younger and less certain, who stopped things from going further. He bargained the boy out for a fraction of the original demand, drove the child to the edge of a suburban street in north London, and told him to walk toward the lights.

"Blame your father," the man said. "Not me."

The boy walked. He found a police station. He told them his name, and the officer behind the desk appeared not to know what to do with a Marlowe in distress, the family's public relations team had by then put it about that the boy had simply run away, and so the boy was placed in care, and the story of Oliver Marlowe passed quietly from the world.

** Present Day **

"My mother?" Oliver asked, in the back of the Rolls-Royce, watching the London streetlights slide past.

"She died four years after your disappearance," Edmund said. He did not soften it. Edmund had never softened things, which was one of the reasons Oliver had loved him as a child. "She believed you were gone. She did not recover."

Oliver looked at the window for a long time. The anger did not spike, it settled, adding itself to the existing weight like sediment, patient and accumulating.

"And the old man wants me back."

"He is dying. He wants to see you before he goes, and he wants to put the business in order."

"He has Sebastian."

Edmund's pause was the length of exactly one measured breath. "Sebastian had an accident. Three years ago. There is damage the doctors have not been able to fully address. He is... intermittently unreliable."

"Unreliable." Oliver turned the word over.

"The Board will not accept him as successor. Reginald has no one else."

"He had me," Oliver said, his voice not loud. "He chose to have no one else."

Edmund did not argue. He looked at his hands.

The hospital was private, quiet, and expensive -- the kind of place that managed suffering with good art on the walls and very soft footsteps in the corridors. Reginald Ashworth occupied a suite on the top floor. He was diminished in the bed, oxygen cannula beneath his nose, his skin carrying the translucent quality of old parchment. He looked, Oliver thought, like a man who had finally been presented with the bill for something he had always known he owed.

"Oliver," the old man said.

Oliver stood at the foot of the bed and said nothing.

"I have wronged you. I know that nothing I say tonight…"

"Then say what you actually want," Oliver said.

Reginald studied him for a moment with something that might have been respect. He gestured toward Edmund, who produced a document folder and set it on the bedside table.

"Ashworth Continental Hotels. It is underperforming. There are conditions in my will: if you can stabilise and grow the division within one year, the entirety of the Ashworth Group transfers to you. If not…"

"It goes to Sebastian," Oliver said. "Or a charity. One of those."

"Sebastian." The old man said it with the particular flatness of a man who has already grieved a son.

Oliver read the documents. They were thorough, fair, and clearly the work of a very expensive solicitor. He set them back down.

"Why should I do anything for you?"

"Because it is yours by right," Reginald said. "And because you are the kind of man who cannot leave a failing thing unfixed."

Oliver looked at him for a long moment. He picked up the pen from the table and signed.

"Do not mistake this for forgiveness," he said. "I am taking what is mine. Nothing more."

He left without another word. In the corridor, Edmund fell into step beside him.

"Thank you," Edmund said quietly.

"Not for him," Oliver said. "For myself."

In the suite, Reginald Ashworth removed the oxygen cannula and sat up and told the nurse he would like a cup of tea. His performance had been sincere, which was the strange part. The grief in his face had been real. Only the degree of physical deterioration had been, slightly and managed for effect.

He sat with his tea and thought about his eldest son, who had signed the papers without hesitation and left without turning back, and felt something that was equal parts pride and shame.