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

CHAPTER FIVE

This was the first time that Ethan was sleeping in an actual room with an actual bed that wasn’t the storage closet under the stairs. It was a king sized mattress in a neat room, bigger than any other room he had been let into his whole life. 

The room was silent. There wasn’t Margaret voice cutting through the room or footsteps crossing the kitchen floor. His new space was completely free of Derek's television sounding through the ceiling or the scornful remarks coming from other family members.

This space was his.

He laid still for a moment and looked at the ceiling, allowing himself feel the difference.

'You just slept in a real bed, in an actual room with a door that closes properly.' He sat up slowly. 

His ribs still ached but overnight, it was beginning to heal. His hands were steady and his head was clear in a way that had nothing to do with rest alone. The information the ring had poured into him through the night sat perfectly arranged in his mind, not scattered, not overwhelming. Just there, the way a language felt when you had been speaking it your whole life without knowing.

He knew the names of every major business family in the city and their financial weak points. He knew the underground network that the Drake family had built across two hundred years and who ran each piece of it. He knew the structure of Drake Industries down to its smallest subsidiary. The same subsidiary Gerald Cole had been stealing from for eleven years.

'You cleaned Gerald Cole's pool while his company ran on your money.' The thought of it was funny and ironic but he choose not to get angry right now. Anger was something he could afford later, right now he needed to think clearly.

Solomon came in at seven am in the morning with two cups of tea and set one on the table beside Ethan's bed. He took the chair without being invited, which Ethan was already learning was simply how Solomon entered every room.

"How do you feel?" Solomon asked.

"Better than I should. My wounds are supposed to be worse, but instead they are healing."

Solomon smiled briefly. 

"The ring accelerates recovery in our bloodline.” He paused. His eyes carried that faraway look it always had when he thought about his late son. “Your father was the same way. He broke three ribs in a horse riding accident when he was twenty-four and was back on his feet in four days. The doctors called it remarkable but we all knew what it what it was."

Ethan looked at the ring. "What else does it do?"

"It gives you what you are already built to carry," Solomon said. "Knowledge. Strength. Instinct. It does not create things that are not there. It opens what the bloodline already contains." He took a slow sip of his tea. "Your father would have developed it fully by thirty and you are twenty-eight so the time is right. You have just been kept from the right conditions until now."

Ethan was quiet for a moment. "You said I would be announced today."

"Tonight there is an event. It will be the largest gathering of the city's business world this season and every family that matters will be in that room." Solomon set his cup down. "They will see you for the first time tonight and the first ten minutes will determine how the next ten years go. Not what you say but how you carry yourself when people who have underestimated you their entire lives suddenly have to look up to you."

'Every person in that room tonight will decide who you are in the first ten minutes.' Ethan turned the black card over in his fingers. 'Gerald spent eighteen years deciding. So did Derek and Vivian. But tonight is for everyone else.'

"I need one stop before the event," Ethan said.

Solomon looked at him. "Where?"

"I need a suit."

But it wasn’t really a suit that Ethan needed. He needed a piece of jewelry which the ring told him was completely essential if he wanted to unlock his full potential.

***

Aria looked at him as he approached the car.

"You look better," she said.

"I feel better."

The car that Solomon's people put him in cost more than the Cole mansion's annual maintenance budget and the driver did not speak unless spoken to. The seats were the kind of leather that made no sound when you shifted your weight and hugged him perfectly.

Aria insisted on coming with him and no matter how much he argued, she put her feet down and drove beside him to one of the best stores in the city. 

Ethan had not yet decided how to feel about her. 'She saved you from lying in that yard all night and she has not yet asked you for a single thing in return. That is either genuine or it is the most sophisticated version of something else.'

“Please stay here. I’ll love to go in alone.” He said when the car stopped. 

Aria was about to step down but she stopped. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Ethan looked at her. “I can handle it.”

"But Solomon wants me to go in with you."

"I would rather go in alone."

She studied him for a moment and something moved behind her eyes that might have been amusement. "Fine. I will be right here."

The store was the kind of establishment that did not display prices. The staff wore uniforms that cost more than most people's monthly salaries and moved through the floor with a specific attentiveness reserved for customers who spent without calculating first.

Immediately Ethan walked in, every eye in the place made a quiet assessment of him. He was wearing clothes Solomon's people had found for him that morning. Clean and fitted yet nothing that announced itself. He looked like someone who might belong here or might not and the staff could not clearly decide which so they let him move through the store freely.

He moved to the display case near the back of the floor where a piece had been set under individual lighting. 

It was a watch. Old design, modern craftsmanship, and so expensive that it could only be found in one case in one store in the world waiting for whoever knew it worth and could afford it.

'This is the one.' He mumbled when he looked at it and the ring pulsed once in agreement.