2023-11-06 21:10:36Nate walked slowly into Mark Lucius' luxurious mansion. He passed several of Mark's family maids on his way to the room where Wien was. They all immediately turned away when he looked at them.
"Where is Mrs. Wien?" Nate asked one of the maids who was cleaning a vase of flowers. But the woman remained silent, not answering Nate's question.
"This time they must have asked the servants not to respond to my words," Nate thought with a deep sigh.
Nate was forced to wander around Mark's house in search of Wien's whereabouts. From the first floor to the third, he found no sign of her after checking every room there. Nate then went to the fourth floor of Mark's house.
There, Wien appeared on the balcony, accompanied by a male servant who brought her a drink. The male servant left immediately when Nate approached the balcony. Wien immediately turned to the side and gave Nate a sharp look.
"Who told you to come here?" Wien snapped as she glared at Nate.
"But there was a servant who asked me to come to the mistress," Nate replied as he stopped his steps.
"I asked you to come here. But it's rude of you to just walk in," Wien said.
"What do you mean, ma'am?" asked Nate, raising his eyebrows in confusion.
"Crawl over here!" said Wien without hesitation.
"What?" said Nate in disbelief. Wien's order seemed too much for him at the moment.
"Why, does your pride keep you from crawling in front of me?" asked Wien as she stood up.
"Scum like you don't know how to repay a favor. Your vow to your late father seems to be nothing but talk. You would have ended up like those poor dogs on the street if he hadn't helped you," Wien continued.
"No, no. Didn't you swear to treat me well?" retorted Nate, unable to contain his anger.
"You have the nerve to talk back to me. You useless piece of trash," Wien grumbled as she pulled out her cell phone and typed a message.
"I'm just telling the truth. If Mr. Lucius was still around, you wouldn't be doing this," Nate said.
"My father is not coming back to this world. There's no point in talking about someone who's already gone. Even a low trash mouth like you isn't worthy to speak my father's name," Wien said.
"You really are too much," Nate grumbled inwardly.
"I didn't think you'd dare defy me after my father's death. You really don't know how to repay a favor. Your mother and father's mountains of debt were paid in full by my father. You're lower than a filthy pig!" Wien snapped, pointing at Nate's face.
"I kept quiet out of respect for Mr. Lucius! But what you're doing now is too much!" shouted Nate, unable to contain his anger.
Suddenly, there was the sound of many footsteps behind Nate. At that moment, Nate was about to turn around. But two stun guns hit Nate in the back before he could turn around. Suddenly, Nate grimaced in pain as his body fell to the ground.
Nate could see the faces of the guards attacking him from behind. But he could do nothing because his body felt very weak and powerless. Soon he was no longer aware of what was happening to him.
***
Nate slowly opened his eyes. The atmosphere around him seemed dim because of the lack of light. Nate could still feel the pain in his back from the impact of the stun gun. Nate looked around as if he wanted to know where he was.
"Is this the fruit warehouse in the backyard?" Nate muttered as he saw several stacks of boxes with fruit.
"My hands," Nate mumbled when he realized he couldn't move his hands.
It turned out that Nate was sitting in a chair at the time. Both his hands and feet were tied directly to the back of the chair. The sound of footsteps could be heard from outside the room where Nate was.
"They've gone too far," Nate grumbled as he tried to untie the ropes in his hands.
But Nate's actions were in vain as the bonds were too strong and his hands could not move freely. Nate stopped when he heard the sound of clattering footsteps approaching the entrance. Slowly the door opened wide so that Nate could see who was coming.
"Mark Lucius," Nate thought as he saw Wien's man arrive from the Lucius residence with four security guards.
"Looks like you're awake, scum," Mark said as he gave Nate a sharp look.
"What are you going to do?" Nate asked.
"Ho. You have the nerve to call me that," Mark said as he approached and kicked Nate in the chest until Nate's body fell backwards along with the chair he was sitting on.
"Call me Master Mark!" snapped Mark as he looked at Nate who winced in pain.
"We'll torture him for you, sir," a guard said.
"No need. We can't leave any evidence that he was tortured," Mark refused.
"Very well, sir," the guard replied.
"Nate Evander. Your life is coming to an end, I hope you are prepared for the consequences of daring to defy my wife," Mark said as he placed one foot on Nate's chest, who was still lying in his chair on the floor.
"I have waited for this moment in my life. I'm tired of seeing you in my father's luxurious mansion! You must pay for everything my father gave you!" Mark continued.
"Mr. Lucius himself asked me to stay with you. I don't like it at all," Nate replied.
"How dare you be so presumptuous with me!" snapped Mark as he stomped his foot on Nate's chest.
Suddenly Nate felt pain in his chest. His breathing also felt tight because he was being squeezed by Mark's foot. But Nate tried to hold his breath to ease the pain until Mark let go of his leg.
"Later, Sicilia will come here to give you one last gift," Mark said as he stood up.
"Let him sit comfortably again. You don't need to feed him until tomorrow. Just give him water so he doesn't die here. I don't want the stench of his carcass in this fruit warehouse," Mark ordered before leaving the room where Nate was.
"All right, sir!" the guards replied as they woke Nate up so he could sit down again.
"I don't know what they promised you. But I didn't think you could do this to another human being," Nate said as he looked at the departing guards.
"Poor people should just shut up!" snapped one guard.
The door closed again after the four guards left the room. Nate could only close his eyes and remember all the events of his life so far. The figures of his deceased father and mother returned to his mind.
Three hours later, footsteps approached the room where Nate was. Nate's gaze was immediately drawn to the entrance of the room as it began to open. Soon his wife appeared and entered with four security guards.
But Nate's eyes were drawn to a man whose hand his wife was holding tightly. The man was maybe two years older than Nate. Sicilia smiled with satisfaction when she saw Nate's shocked expression.
"So he's a poor man who dreams of getting a wife as beautiful as you?" the man asked, looking at Sicilia.
"Who are you?" asked Nate as he stared at the man Sicilia was holding.
"Don't be presumptuous with Mr. Dominic!" a guard snapped as he slapped Nate's left cheek until it turned red.
"Leave him alone. Let Sicilia introduce me," said the man Sicilia was holding.
"He is my future husband, Dominic," Sicilia said as she pressed her body against him.
"What did you say?" asked Nate as he glared at Sicilia.
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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