THE EXILED PRINCE SON-IN-LAW STRIKES BACK

Chapter 9: Raven Holdings

TO THE BOARD OF ASHWORTH FINE ART AND AUCTIONS.

The words appeared on the giant screen one line at a time, white on black, and the whole showroom fell silent to read them.

AS OF 9:41 THIS EVENING, ALL DEBTS OF ASHWORTH FINE ART AND AUCTIONS, TOTALING THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS, HAVE BEEN PURCHASED FROM ITS CREDITORS BY RAVEN HOLDINGS.

Someone gasped. Beatrice grabbed the back of a chair.

THE DEBT WILL NOT BE CALLED TONIGHT. THE FAMILY WILL HAVE FIVE YEARS TO REPAY IT, AT FAIR TERMS.

ONE CONDITION APPLIES.

ALL DECISIONS REGARDING THIS DEBT WILL BE MADE BY MS. VICTORIA ASHWORTH, AND BY HER ALONE.

RAVEN HOLDINGS.

The screen went black.

For a long moment, nobody in the room said a word. Then the auctioneer, Mr. Pell, lowered his wooden hammer very slowly to the podium, as if it had suddenly become very heavy.

"Well," he said into the microphone. "I believe... I believe the Ashworth family is not going anywhere tonight."

The room burst into noise again, louder than before. Buyers turned to each other, asking who Raven Holdings was. Reporters shouted at their phones. One of them ran up the aisle toward Beatrice, holding out a microphone.

"Lady Beatrice! Lady Beatrice, who are Raven Holdings? Did you know about this?"

Beatrice opened her mouth and closed it again. For the first time since I'd met her, she had nothing to say.

Then, slowly, a new expression spread across her face: a smile. "Raven Holdings," she said, testing the name. "Well. Clearly someone in this city still values the Ashworth name. Old friends of the family, no doubt. We have so many."

On the stage, Victoria stood frozen, staring at the black screen. Her lips moved silently around the name. Raven Holdings.

Anton Rask had stopped halfway up the aisle. He turned back toward the stage, and his face had gone from white to a deep, ugly red.

"Who are they?" he demanded. "Who is Raven Holdings? Victoria, who are these people?"

"I have no idea," Victoria said slowly. And I could see she was telling the truth.

"This is a trick." Anton's voice rose. "This whole night has been a trick! You set me up!"

"Nobody set you up, Mr. Rask," Victoria said, and her voice was steady again. "You brought a fake painting into my house. That's all anyone needs to know."

Behind me, near the bar, someone laughed. Then someone else. It spread through the room like a cold wind, not loud, but everywhere: the sound of three hundred rich people laughing at a man they'd been flattering an hour ago.

Anton heard it. His face twisted.

He turned and walked out of the showroom fast, pushing past reporters, his white jacket flapping. At the side door, he passed within a foot of me. He didn't stop, but he looked down at me as if I were something stuck to his shoe.

"Enjoy it while it lasts, stray," he hissed, and was gone. The cameras followed him all the way out the door. The man in the grey suit from Northline Arts had already disappeared.

Backstage, beside the curtain, the leather folder still lay open on its little table. The silver pen rolled off the edge and clattered onto the floor. Nobody picked it up.

The divorce deal was dead.

My phone buzzed again. Sasha: Done. The papers are signed. The debt is ours. Breathe, Leon.

I realized I had been holding my breath.

And then, because they were Ashworths, the family began to rewrite the evening while it was still happening.

Beatrice recovered first. It took her less than a minute. She smoothed her gold dress, lifted her chin and turned to the reporter with the microphone.

"Of course I suspected," she said brightly. "We Ashworths always knew there was something not quite right about Anton Rask. New money, you understand. One can always tell. I only went along with his offer to see how far he would go."

The reporter wrote it down.

Rupert pushed his way to the front, his cigar back between his teeth. "I noticed something odd about that painting days ago," he told anyone who would listen. "The frame. I said to myself, Rupert, that frame is too shiny. I was going to say something, but my cousin beat me to it. Family, you know. We think alike."

A collector beside him nodded politely and moved away. Nobody had heard him say anything of the kind.

A woman from the society magazine pushed her microphone toward me by mistake, thinking I was a security guard. "Excuse me, did you see who sent that message?"

"I just park the cars, ma'am," I said.

She lost interest at once and turned away.

Charles sat in the front row, still staring at his program. His hands were trembling. Then, very slowly, he looked up at his daughter on the stage, and for a moment his tired face looked almost proud.

"Victoria," he said quietly, too quietly for anyone but the people beside him to hear. "Well done."

Beatrice glared at him. He lowered his eyes again, but he didn't take the words back.

Rupert, still talking about the shiny frame, turned to me as if he'd only just noticed I was there. "What are you staring at, stray? Go and fetch the cars. The guests are leaving."

"Yes, Rupert," I said quietly.

At the end of the row, old Edmund Ashworth hadn't moved at all. He sat with both hands folded on top of his silver cane, watching the black screen where the message had been, with an expression I couldn't read.

I stayed where I was, by the side door, with my back against the wall.

Nobody looked at me. Nobody ever did. I was the driver; I was furniture. In a room full of people asking who Raven Holdings could possibly be, not one of them glanced at the man in the cheap black suit standing six feet from the stage.

Except one.

On the stage, Victoria had turned away from the reporters and the shouting crowd. Slowly, almost without meaning to, her eyes moved across the room: past her mother, past Rupert, past the cameras and the chandeliers and the velvet chairs.

They stopped on me.

She didn't say anything. She just looked at me for a long, long time, with a small line between her eyebrows, as if she were looking at a painting she'd seen every day for three years and had only now noticed something wrong in the corner.

I looked back at her. Then I lowered my eyes, the way a good servant does.

A moment later, a dozen reporters reached the stage and surrounded her, all shouting at once. Victoria lifted one hand.

"No more questions tonight," she said. "The Spring Auction is over. Thank you all for coming." And she walked off the stage through the curtain, past the little table with the empty folder, without looking back.

The first battle was over. Twenty-three days remained until the vote in Kestrograd, and this had only been the first step. The Ashworths were safe. The wedding was dead. And my wife was standing in the light, where she belonged, with her name clean.

But when I glanced at my phone, there was a new message from Sasha, sent thirty seconds ago.

Rask's men will collect that painting tomorrow. Open the frame before they do. A source says Anton's people use frames to hide papers.