2023-11-06 21:09:21"Are you blind? Look at the dust!" snapped the middle-aged woman named Liene. Her index finger seemed to point to a corner of the house wall. In front of her, a young man bent down to clean the corner.
"Sorry, ma'am, but that's the pattern of the granite," replied the young man named Nate Evander.
"What a useless son-in-law! When I tell you to clean it, clean it quickly!" snapped Liene as she kicked Nate in the butt as he bent down to look at the corner of the wall. Nate's head hit the wall.
"You suck! My pet dog is more useful than you," Liene grumbled as she left Nate stroking his head.
"Hmm..." Nate just let out a deep sigh as he sat on the floor.
Other janitors seemed to pass by his in-laws' house regardless of his presence. As a son-in-law of the Damian Lucius family, he should be respected like his other children and in-laws.
"Nate!" shouted a teenager who had just entered the room. The teenager seemed to be wearing the clothes of Vienna International High School, the most elite school in the city of Vienna.
"What's up, Tedd?" asked Nate as he stood up.
"Mr. Tedd! Didn't I tell you to call me that, huh?" Tedd snapped as he glared at Nate.
"But you're my brother-in-law, why should I call you mister? Didn't I call you Tedd before?" asked Nate, frowning.
"You damn dog! I didn't want a brother-in-law like you," Tedd yelled as he grabbed Nate by the collar.
"After Grandpa died, you were the only dog in the house! In fact, you were a street dog that Grandpa picked up a long time ago! If you refuse my orders, you will be locked up in the basement to die," Tedd continued as he shoved Nate's body.
"All right," Nate muttered under his breath.
"Go wash my car before school. I heard you touched it earlier," Tedd ordered.
"Okay," Nate replied as he took a deep breath. He realized there was no point in resisting.
Tedd whistled quickly as he walked away, leaving Nate alone. For a moment, Nate stared at the ceiling of the mansion that belonged to his wife's family. He had been there for over a year since he had married Sicilia at the request of his grandfather Lucius.
He had always been treated badly by Lucius' extended family. Insulted, humiliated, and reviled almost daily. But he could be patient because Lucius always defended him when he knew he was being insulted. But six days ago, Lucius died of old age.
The behavior of his extended family became unstoppable, and they became even more insulting to Nate. Sicilia, his wife, has also become increasingly distant. Even now she does not want to be close to Nate. Nate's room has also been moved to warehouse.
"If only Mr. Lucius hadn't made me swear. Then I wouldn't be living here anymore," Nate muttered as he left the room.
"Even though they swore in front of Mr. Lucius to be good to me, the fact is they are very easy to break," Nate grumbled.
Nate walked out of the Damian Lucius family's magnificent mansion. A large courtyard was clearly visible to the eye. Around the Lucius house were three mansions, each four hundred square meters in size.
The three mansions were the residences of Lucius' three sons named Mark Lucius, Damian Lucius, and Xavier Lucius. Surrounding the three homes are orchards, vegetable gardens, parks, fish ponds and several other buildings, including residences for workers and security guards.
"The hundreds of employees who work here are much better off than I am," Nate muttered as he walked toward the Ferrari that Tedd often drove to school.
"You're just cleaning the car at this hour? No wonder you're so poor," sneered the beautiful woman who had just come out of the house.
"I-"
"Don't talk to me already. I don't want to be poor because of you, you trash," said the beautiful woman, who was none other than Nate's own wife, Sicilia.
"What happened to you? Your attitude has gotten worse since Grandpa died," Nate asked, seemingly holding back his frustration at being insulted by his own wife.
"Grandpa? You don't deserve to call Lucius' grandfather that! Our marriage was a sham from the start! I married you against my grandfather's wishes!" Sicilia snapped as she glared at Nate.
"Get away from me! I'm disgusted with you!" Sicilia continued with a shudder and walked to her luxury car.
Sicilia's personal chauffeur opened the door. Then they left Damian's yard. Nate let out a deep sigh as he wiped Tedd's car clean. Soon, a middle-aged man and woman came out of the house, neatly dressed.
"Who told you to hold my son's fancy car, huh?" the middle-aged man snapped as he slapped Nate on the cheek.
"Sorry, Dad. But Tedd himself asked me to clean it," Nate replied while holding his cheek.
"Where did you come from? I wouldn't want a son-in-law like you!" Damian snapped as he slapped Nate on the other cheek.
"You don't have to go to the office today, we've fired you!" snapped Liene, who had watched her husband slap Nate.
"Fired? Isn't there an agreement that I'm still going to work there?" asked Nate with a surprised look on his face.
Lucius had hired Nate as a director in one of the branches of Lucius' business group. He had also drawn up a letter of agreement so that Nate could continue to work there without being disturbed by his other children and son-in-law.
"Agreement? They expired after Grandpa died! You won't get anything back," Damian replied.
"Stop talking so much! You're wasting our time," Liene replied as she looked at her luxury car that had just pulled out of the garage. The driver who brought the car out immediately opened the door for Liene and Damian who were still standing in front of Nate.
"Remember, you know yourself! You're a piece of shit in this house!" Damian snapped as he pressed his finger against Nate's forehead.
Damian and Liene quickly got into their car and drove out of the yard. This morning's clear sky didn't make Nate's life any better. Nate just sighed deeply as he breathed in the fresh morning air.
"Nate! Quickly wash the clothes of the male janitors in this house! I have asked the janitors to collect them in the laundry room!" Tedd ordered as he came out of the house.
"Get out of the way! I'm going to school," Tedd said as he pushed Nate away from the car.
Tedd drove the car out of the yard. Nate heard laughter in the distance. It was Vin Lucius, the youngest son of Mark Lucius. He seemed to be laughing with satisfaction at the sight of Nate being pushed by Tedd.
"He's still in middle school. But his attitude has been infected with the bad attitudes of his parents and his other siblings," Raff muttered.
"How dare you look at me like that, huh!" snapped Vin as he turned his back.
Nate immediately entered his in-laws' house. All the janitors there did not want to talk to him, they even stayed away from Nate. But Nate didn't care, because it must be an order from Damian and his wife.
Nate began to wash all the male janitors' clothes in Damian's residence. He also dried them himself without any help. Nate could sigh for a moment because the residents of the house who always insulted him were not at home.
"Nate!" came a sudden shout from outside the room where Nate was.
"Yes!" replied Nate as he opened the door to the barn where he was resting.
"Mrs. Wien has asked you to come to her house," explained the servant who had called Nate. Without waiting for Nate's answer, she left immediately, leaving Nate still in a confused silence.
"As usual. One of the three brothers must have missed work to stay here and insult me," Nate muttered with a deep sigh.
Continued...
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Chapter 189: The Richest Man No One Knows
Five years is enough time for a city to forget almost anything, if the city wants to forget it badly enough, and Vienna had wanted to forget a great deal. The Lucius name still existed, technically. It sat on a handful of old deeds nobody bothered updating, on a mausoleum in the public cemetery where fewer flowers arrived every year, on the occasional business-school case study about family conglomerates that collapsed under their own cruelty a footnote now, cited the way people cited old scandals they only half remembered the details of, more useful as a cautionary shape than as a story anyone still felt anything about. The Alphons name had gone the same way, faster if anything, folded into two paragraphs of a magazine retrospective about corporate consolidation in the hospitality sector, Fredric's own photograph reduced to a small inset beside a chart showing which of his properties had changed hands and to whom. Robert had kept the government-facing pieces alive, quietly, the wa
Chapter 188: Nate Evander
He didn't answer Luna that night. She hadn't pushed him to, had simply watched him stand there with the question hanging unanswered between them, and after a while she'd risen, touched his arm once, briefly, and let herself out without making him fill a silence he wasn't ready to fill. He'd stood in the kitchen a long while after she left, the last glass still in his hand, and understood, finally, that the question wasn't one he could answer standing in an apartment full of the last two years' furniture, surrounded by everything he'd built to survive a war that no longer existed. He drove to the cemetery three days later, alone, no earpiece, no car following at a discreet distance, because some places had stopped needing an escort the moment the last man who might have threatened him there had already been buried himself. The morning was cold in the particular way autumn got cold before it fully committed to winter, the sky a flat, colorless gray that made the grass look duller tha
Chapter 187: What's Left of Dark Crimson
Jo hadn't set foot in the basement in three weeks, and the strangeness of that still hadn't worn off. He kept catching himself reaching for a phone that didn't need to buzz every hour anymore, kept waking at four in the morning out of pure habit and lying there in the dark of an apartment that actually had windows now, curtains he'd chosen himself, waiting for an emergency that never arrived. The meeting happened at Nate's place, the same kitchen table that had held a hundred plans over two years, coffee rings worn permanent into the wood, though tonight nobody had bothered pulling up a corkboard or a laptop or a floor plan of anything at all. Just five chairs, five people, and a bottle of something dark and expensive that Boars had brought and nobody had touched yet. Nate sat at the head of the table the way he always sat, though something in his posture tonight carried less weight than Jo had seen from him in longer than he could remember, the particular looseness of a man who'd
Chapter 186: Delta Ascendant
Sean had never planned a party for four hundred people before, and it showed in the way he kept checking his phone every few minutes even though every possible thing that could go wrong had already been accounted for three times over by a events coordinator he'd hired specifically because she didn't panic at things Sean still panicked at. The ballroom Delta Group had rented for the night sat on the top two floors of a hotel that, six months ago, would have politely declined a company Sean's size the honor of even asking. Tonight the banners hung floor to ceiling on either side of the stage DELTA GROUP, the logo simple, unadorned, the same clean lettering Sean had picked out himself in a rented apartment two years ago with mismatched furniture and a burner phone buzzing on the table beside him. "You look like you're about to give a eulogy instead of a toast," Joseph said, appearing at his elbow with two glasses of champagne, handing one over without asking whether Sean wanted it. "
Chapter 185: Dominic and Sicilia, Last Images
The letter arrived on prison stationery, the return address stamped rather than written, and Nate turned it over twice in his hands before he let himself open it, standing at the kitchen counter with the morning's coffee gone cold beside him the way it always went cold lately, nobody in this apartment ever quite finishing a cup before the next thing needed doing. He recognized the handwriting before he'd read a single line of it. Careful, looping, the particular practiced neatness of a man who'd spent his whole life believing penmanship was one more small proof of superiority over people who'd never had the leisure to perfect it. “Nate ” “I don't expect a reply. I'm not sure I'd know what to do with one if it came. I've had a great deal of time in here to think about the shape of what happened to me, and I find I keep circling back to one particular morning the party, the recording, the sound of my own voice on every screen in Vienna before I'd even finished my coffee that day. I
Chapter 184: Frans's Inheritance
The apartment Robert's people found him was smaller than the one he'd given up the night he broke into his father's study, three rooms above a dry cleaner's in a part of the city Frans had driven through a hundred times without ever once considering he might live there. The radiator clanked when it ran. The window in the bedroom didn't quite close all the way, so a thin line of cold always found its way in along the sill, and Frans had taken to keeping a rolled towel there, the particular petty domesticity of a man who'd spent thirty-one years with staff to handle exactly this kind of problem and now had nobody but himself. He'd been living there eleven days when Robert's lawyer called to arrange the meeting. "Your uncle would like to see you," the lawyer said, a careful, neutral voice that gave away nothing about what waited on the other end of the arrangement. "There are matters concerning the estate that require your presence, given your father's passing." "Which matters." "I'
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