Library
Search
Home / Romance / THE HEIR'S REVENGE / chapter 68
chapter 68
Author: Benjamin Jones
last update2026-06-22 16:02:14

Mrs. Park was really in the kitchen when we got downstairs and I was glad about that.

When she saw Emma, she was surprised. She glanced at me but looked away quietly. She was a quiet woman who always had questions but chose not to ask so she doesn't sound intrusive.

"Mrs Park, could you please make something for lunch?" I asked.

"Of course Sir," she said and immediately started moving around the kitchen with her usual efficiency. She had worked here even before I lived here and she had proved that she was one of the few people I could trust.

Emma sat down at the kitchen table like she owned the place. She looked around the kitchen with curious eyes. I nodded and sat across from her.

I didn't sit close to her but across from her. I had a reason for that.

“Your kitchen is beautiful.” She said. “Id never come inside before.”

I had wanted us to sit at the dining table but it seems like she prefered the kitchen.

"Thank you," I said.

She must have seen the butterfly garlands through the kitchen kitchen window. "Those are from Lily's party aren't they?"

"Yes," I said.

"She wanted to keep them up?" She seemed interested.

"She decided they were permanent decorations," I said and saw Emma smile at that. It was a genuine smile, I could see.

But I looked away.

"So," I said, keeping my voice casual and easy. "You said there might be more information coming soon about Victoria. What did you mean by that exactly?"

Emma looked at me.

She knew what I was doing. I could see it in her face. She was not stupid. She had never been stupid. That was always the complicated thing about Emma. She was intelligent enough to know when she was being handled.

But she answered anyway.

"Daniel called me two nights ago," she said.

I kept my face completely neutral. "Daniel called you?"

"Yes." She folded her hands on the table. "He is still in custody but apparently they allowed him a phone call and he used it to call me." She paused. "He wanted me to find out how much you know.”

So Daniel was trusting Emma to help him get me but she was here helping me instead. I didn't know if that was supposed to make me happy or sad.

She was betraying someone for me, it only meant she could betray me for someone else.

"And what did you tell him?" I asked.

"I told him I didn't know anything," she said. "Which was mostly true at the time."

"Mostly," I said.

She looked at me steadily. "I told him you seemed confident. That was all."

"That was all?" I was still very much skeptical.

“Yes. I never told him anything about our conversations or the information I shared with you.” She glared at me. “I know you don't believe me but that was exactly what happened.”

I looked at her for a moment.

Then I nodded slowly and said nothing.

Mrs Park put a plate of rice and stew on the table between us with two bowls. She also put a jug of cold water and two cups. She did all of this quietly and efficiently and then went to the other side of the kitchen to continue what she was doing.

Emma looked at the food.

"This smells amazing," she said.

"Mrs Park is an excellent cook," I said.

I had expected Emma to wait so that Mrs. Pack would serve her but she stood up and served herself and for a while, the two of us sat in silence. I wasn't very hungry but I had to keep her company.

"I remember the first time," Emma said after a while, "that time you cooked for me. That's the first time."

I remembered.

I did not say that I remembered.

"You made foreign rice just like this one," she said. "It was the best jollof rice I had ever eaten.”

It was true. I had cooked for her and she had appreciated it so much that it made me feel so great about myself.

"Emma," I said, keeping my voice gentle but firm.

She looked up.

"Let us keep this simple," I said. "You have information that helps me. I appreciate that and I am grateful for it. But I need you to understand that this is what this is. It is not more than that."

She looked at me for a long moment.

I didn't want to hurt her but I still had to make it clear to her that I wasn't doing this for her.

"I know," she said quietly.

"Good," I said.

"I just wanted to say something about the jollof rice," she said. "That is all. I am not trying to start anything."

"Okay," I said.

She nodded and went back to eating. We ate in a silence that felt a bit uncomfortable at first but it got better.

Then suddenly I heard small feet on the stairs. It was Lily. Her small feet were coming down the stairs. She wore a red dress and was carrying her rabbit as usual.

It was obvious she had been sleeping.

She looked at me. Then she looked at Emma.

Her eyes went slightly wide.

"Aunt Emma is here," she said. She wasn't asking a question.

"Yes," I said.

Lily looked at Emma again. Emma was already smiling at her with genuine warmth. The kind of warmth that Lily could always detect as real because Lily had an instinct for that.

This was one of the things I was trying to avoid too.

"Hello Lily," Emma said.

"Hello," Lily said. She walked into the kitchen and went to Mrs Park first. "Can I have some?" she asked, looking at the food.

"Of course," Mrs Park said and immediately started serving her a small bowl. Lily brought her bowl to the table and sat down beside Emma.

I watched this happen and said nothing.

"Your hair is flat on one side," Emma said to her gently.

Lily touched her hair. "I was sleeping," she said.

"Do you want me to fix it?" Emma asked.

Lily thought about this seriously for a moment. Then she handed Emma her rabbit to hold and turned around on her chair so Emma could reach her hair.

I looked at this scene happening in my kitchen and felt something complicated move through my chest.

Emma fixed Lily's hair carefully. I watched her do it. She was quite relaxed as she did it like she was a pro in this.

"Done," she said.

Lily turned back around and took her rabbit back.

"Thank you," she said simply and started eating her food.

Continue to read this book for free
Scan the code to download the app
Previous ChapterNext Chapter

Latest Chapter

  • chapter 168

    Daniel's message arrived on the tenth day, through a channel none of us had expected — not Patricia's office, not Henry's careful monitoring of the family's various legal and security threads, but a handwritten letter, delivered by ordinary post, addressed to me personally in a hand I recognised immediately, having seen it before, years ago, on the kind of careless, confident notes Daniel had once left scattered around the Pierce household, back when confidence had come easily to him.Henry brought it to me unopened, his expression carrying a particular careful alertness."This arrived through standard mail," he said. "No courier, no attempt at anonymity. Simply posted, with his name clearly written as the return address."I opened it carefully, and found, inside, a single sheet of paper, the handwriting considerably less confident than I remembered it, the words themselves careful and deliberate in a way that suggested he had rewritten the letter more tha

  • chapter 167

    The formal charges arrived three weeks after Margaret's statement, delivered through official channels that moved, for once, with a speed that surprised even Patricia."Swiss federal prosecutors have filed charges," she told me, reading from a translated summary her office had received that morning, the two of us standing in the study while Henry listened from his usual chair near the window. "Breach of fiduciary duty regarding the trust's charitable designation. Falsification of the foundation's stated purpose across multiple regulatory filings. And, most significantly, a charge the prosecutors are calling institutional endangerment of minors, built specifically around the testimony the forty-three former students have now formally provided."I sat with that for a long moment, the particular weight of it settling into something I had not entirely expected to feel — not triumph exactly, though there was some of that threaded through it, but something closer to a genuine, sober gravity

  • chapter 166

    I called Sandra that same afternoon, and told her everything — the meeting at the restaurant, the recording, Margaret's precise offer, and my decision. She was quiet for a long moment after I finished, and when she spoke, her voice carried a particular careful weight I had come to recognise, across two significant stories together, as the sound of a journalist genuinely moved by something beyond the story itself. "I want to be honest with you," she said. "I would have understood if you'd taken the deal. I would not have thought less of you for it. Protecting your family and your company from years of continued litigation is not a small thing to weigh against one woman's privacy, particularly a woman who has already, by every account, suffered a genuine reckoning." "I know," I said. "I almost did take it. Two days of almost taking it, honestly." "What changed," Sandra asked. "My seven-year-old cousi

  • chapter 165

    Lily was at the kitchen table the next morning, methodically arranging her cereal into what I had come to understand was a private, evolving system of classification, when I sat down across from her instead of taking my usual seat. She looked up immediately, reading, as she always did, that something in the shape of the morning had changed. "You're doing the thinking face," she said. "The really serious one. Not the company one. The other one." "I have a question for you," I said. "A real one. I want you to think about it properly before you answer, the way you always do." She set down her spoon, giving me the particular full, undivided attention she reserved for exactly these moments, and I found myself, looking at her small, serious face, grateful, not for the first time, that I had never once made the mistake of treating her seriousness as something smaller than an adult's. "The woman who tried to visit your school," I said carefully. "Margaret. She's asked me for somethin

  • chapter 164

    I did not sleep well that night, and I did not sleep well the two nights after it either.Patricia came to the mansion the following morning, and I laid the offer out for her exactly as Margaret had given it to me, watching her expression shift through several careful stages as she worked through the legal architecture of what was actually being proposed."This is a genuinely favourable settlement, from a purely legal standpoint," she said, once I had finished. "Full withdrawal of her claim. Cessation of the share accumulation. Formal severing from Hargrove, which would very likely finish whatever remains of his shareholder coalition, since he has no independent resources of his own to continue funding it. If you accepted this today, the corporate threat that has occupied a significant portion of this family's attention for months would simply end.""And the cost," I said."The cost is narrower than it sounds," Patricia said carefully. "She is not asking you to suppress the story of R

  • chapter 163

    I thought about Margaret sitting across from me in that quiet hotel sitting room, speaking about her father's cruelty and her own thirty years of silence. I thought about how convincingly she had described a woman who had kept her distance from the family's worst patterns. And I understood, with a sudden, cold clarity, that the woman in those letters, patient, warm, relentlessly invested in shaping the lives of children she had never publicly acknowledged, was not the woman who had described herself to me.Or perhaps she was exactly the same woman, and I had simply been shown only the version she chose.---The regulatory pressure intensified through the following week, and I found myself following it the way one follows a storm on a weather map, tracking each new front as it moved across the continent.A Swiss newspaper obtained and published a partial list of the Vane trust's donations to Ravensbrook, revealing that the annual payments had increased sharply in the two years followin

More Chapter

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on MegaNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
Scan code to read on App