: THEY MOCKED THE GODFATHERS SON OR “FROM MOCKED TO GOD”.

CHAPTER 8

Outside, Vivian's mother was on the phone before her car door fully closed and Vivian picked up on the second ring.

"He is alive," her mother said without any introduction. "And he’s not just alive. He has money behind him, real money, and he just humiliated us in front of half the store. That card he is carrying is not standard. The manager fell over himself the moment he saw it."

Vivian was quiet for a moment. "Who is he with?"

"The president's daughter walked in personally."

Another pause. Longer this time. “Aria?”

“Yes.” Mara answered angrily. “Are you coming or you’re just going to keep asking me questions?”

"Where are you?" Vivian asked.

"In the car outside Harrington's. He is still in there buying things."

"What things?"

"A suit and something from the display case which was the most expensive piece in the store and he bought it like it was nothing." Her mother's voice tightened. "He bought the watch I wanted, Vivian. The one I came in specifically wanted to get."

The silence had a different texture to it.

"Call Derek," Vivian said finally.

"I already tried. He is not picking up."

"Then go to him directly. I need to know who is behind this before tonight." Her voice was flat and tight. "The event is in eight hours. If Ethan is going to be there we need to know exactly what we are walking into."

***

Derek picked up on the fourth attempt.

He listened to everything she said without interrupting and when Vivian's mother finished he was quiet for a moment.

"Wait, did he say he’ll be at the event tonight?" Derek ask. 

"Yes. That was the sole reason he came into the store to get a suite."

Derek smiled at the other end. “Good.”

"Good?" She repeated like it was said in a wrong language.

"Our family is signing an important contract at that same event and with our collaboration that moves your family's position in this city. My contact on the board has confirmed that everything is happening tonight and the only way it does not happen is if someone with more authority than anyone in that room says otherwise." He paused. "Whoever is backing Ethan cannot have more authority than the combined weight of every family in that room. He is bluffing with someone else's chips and the only way to prove it is to call the bluff publicly. Tonight we do exactly that."

She said nothing and Derek continued.

"Tonight we find out exactly what Ethan Cole actually is. And once every important person in this city sees him for what he is, no amount of presidential favor or borrowed black cards will put him back together again."

Vivian looked at the ceiling of her apartment.

'You donated a kidney for me,' she thought, and the thought arrived without the cold detachment she was expecting. Something underneath it was less comfortable than she wanted it to be. 'You gave me two years of blood. You came to propose with a ring you polished for three weeks and I told you it meant nothing.' She pushed the thought down and away. 'You were useful. That is what you were and people who are useful get used. That is how the world works.'

"Fine," she said to Derek. "Tonight."

***

Back at Solomon's residence, Ethan walked out of the car with the suit bag over one arm and the watch box in his other hand and Aria fell into step beside him without comment.

"Your mother called ahead," Solomon said from the doorway.

Ethan stopped. "My mother is dead."

Solomon's expression shifted. "I apologize, poor choice of words. I meant Aria's people called ahead about the store." He looked at the suit bag. "Good. You will need it."

Inside, Solomon walked him through the event with the precise brevity of a man who did not believe in wasting words. He told him the name of everyone who would be in the room, what each family wanted from the evening and where the pressure points were. Ethan absorbed it all and added it everything the ring had told him overnight and the two sources of information fit together the way two halves of the same picture fitted together.

'You know this room already,' he realized. 'You know every person in it before you have met them. You know what they want, what they fear and what it would take to move them.' He turned the watch over in his hand. 'You have never had power in your life but you would walk into that room tonight carrying more of it than anyone there except Solomon himself.'

Three hours before the event he sat alone in the room Solomon had given him and cultivated.

The ring fed his internal energy in slow steady waves and his body pulled it in and built on it until the pain in his ribs became something he could feel distantly. Soon, he couldn’t feel any pain meaningfully at all. His mind sharpened past the point that rest alone could have reached. 

When he opened his eyes the room looked exactly the same but he was a different person sitting in it.

Aria knocked on his door and came in without waiting.

She looked at him for a moment and noticed that something in his posture or his eyes or the way he was sitting had changed and she didn’t comment on it.

"The credential," she said, crossed the room and placed a card in his hand which was heavier than the black card. The Drake family seal pressed into its surface alongside a crest he recognized from the information the ring had given him. The card was a formal event credential belonging to the executive line of Drake Industries. The kind that did not exist in any standard training manual for any security team in the city.

"There will be people in that room tonight who will look at you and see the pool boy," she said. "There will be people who look at you and see Gerald Cole's charity case. There will be people who look at you and see a story that does not add up yet." She looked at him steadily. "Let them look and don’t explain yourself to any of them. The room will do the explaining for you before the night is over."

'She is right.' He closed his hand around the credential. 'You have spent twenty-eight years explaining yourself to people who had already decided not to listen. Not tonight.'

"Thank you," he said.

"Do not thank me," she said. "Just walk in there like you own it. Because you do."

She left.

Ethan sat for another moment in the clean silence of a room that belonged to him. Then he put on the suit.

***

When the convoy pulled up to the venue at eight forty-five, the entrance was lit and the guests were still arriving in steady streams from both directions.

Ethan looked out the window at the building.

'Twenty-eight years,' he thought. 'Twenty-eight years of being invisible in this city and existing below the floor of every room that mattered. Tonight you walk through the front door.'

He looked to his left and through the car window he saw Vivian standing near the venue entrance with Derek beside her. 

Her dress was expensive and her posture was perfect. She was watching guests arrive with the focused attention of someone who was trying to understand the room before she even entered it, building alliances, collecting agreements, and making sure to familiarize herself with people who mattered so they would be on her side before the evening began.

She did not know who was in the car so she straightened her shoulders and said something to Derek that made Derek to smile.

'They have been here an hour already,' Ethan thought. 'They have been getting people to be on their side by telling everyone who would listen who they are and exactly I am are not.'

He looked at them for one more moment then he opened the car door and stepped out into the light.

Vivian's eyes found him before Derek's did and her face went through three different things in under two seconds before it settled into something hard and decided. 

She turned to Derek and said something quickly into his ear. Derek looked up, looked at Ethan. And took in the suit, the credential card in his hand and the way he was standing. 

The smile that had been on his face a moment ago froze immediately.