The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Two: The Promise

His real name was Lucien Varenne, and that evening he stood on the steps of Harbridge Police Headquarters, waiting to lie to the one person who had never lied to him.

Zara came through the glass doors with her coat over her arm and a folded sheet of paper in her hand. She walked like someone stepping off a ride that hadn't quite stopped spinning, and when she saw him she held the paper up between them. "Counsellor of the Valmorran Crown," she read. "Lucien, I couldn't find Valmorre on a map."

"It's in the mountains," he said. "Between three bigger countries."

"That's not an answer." She came down the last steps and lowered her voice as a patrol car rolled past. "A woman in a coat put a folder on the table, and the detective looked like he was going to be sick. Twenty minutes later I'm walking out the front door. Why would a country I've never even visited make me untouchable?"

"I have no idea."

He said it evenly and held her eyes while he did, which was the mistake. Zara had spent years across a desk from him, through investor calls and code reviews and the long nights when the money ran thin. She knew what he looked like when he was calm, and she knew what he looked like when he was deciding to be calm. Her gaze stayed on him a beat too long, and something in her face went quiet.

Then she folded the decree and slid it into her coat pocket. "Okay," she said. "Keep it for now." She said it lightly, but she was still watching him when he looked away first.

She didn't push, and somehow that was worse. He drove her home in silence, and the truth sat in the car between them the whole way. His mother had been an engineer from Harbridge, a woman who trusted things she could build with her own hands. His father had been the crown prince of Valmorre, a mountain country so small that most maps squeezed its name into its neighbors', and so rich that its sovereign fund owned pieces of half the technology on earth. His father had died young. His mother raised Lucien in Harbridge under her own name, Kerrigan, and when she was dying she asked him for one promise. Build something that's yours, she told him. Not your name's.

Lattice had been that something. Tonight he had used the name anyway, for Zara, and he would do it again. He just could not make himself say it out loud.

* * *

Rayne could not touch Zara anymore, so the next morning he turned on the man standing beside her.

The bankruptcy hearing was held in a courtroom far too small for the cameras that had squeezed into it. Somebody had tipped off the press, and they followed Lucien from the doors to his seat, lenses clicking at the founder who had lost everything. Zara sat behind him in the gallery with her arms folded, glaring at anyone who pointed a camera his way.

The trustee read through the assets in a flat voice. Office furniture, servers, a lease nobody wanted. Then came the company name itself, Lattice, with every trademark and domain attached.

"One dollar," said Bastian Vail.

He hadn't stood up to say it. He lounged in the second row in a navy suit that cost more than Lucien's car, one arm stretched across the back of the bench, and no one in the room bid against him. The gavel came down. Lattice, the name Lucien and Zara had painted on a garage door with leftover primer, now belonged to the man who had stolen its code. Behind him, Zara made a small sound, like she had been struck.

Bastian crossed the aisle with his hand already out, and he waited until the photographers had a clean angle before Lucien took it. "No hard feelings," he said, smiling for the cameras. "Did you get my basket?"

"Zara liked the grapes."

Bastian's grip tightened. "Smile, Lucien. This is the last photo anyone will ever want of you."

"Take care of the name," Lucien said quietly. "Names are heavier than they look."

For a second, Bastian's smile slipped. Then the shutters fired again and it was back in place, and he let go.

Two agents from Rayne's task force were waiting by the courtroom doors. One of them handed Lucien a folded notice and didn't bother lowering his voice. "Your personal accounts are frozen, Mr. Kerrigan. The senator would like to know who is paying for your friend's immunity."

There was almost nothing left in those accounts, which meant the point was the humiliation. Lucien read the notice, folded it neatly, and put it in his pocket. Behind him, Zara said something to the agent that made a court officer look over in alarm.

* * *

That night his apartment was all boxes and lamplight. He sat at the kitchen table with a laptop that no longer belonged to a company and a bank card that no longer worked. Every news site in Harbridge carried the same photograph, Bastian grinning as he shook the hand of the founder he had beaten. One headline called it a gracious ending. Lucien closed the tab before he could read the rest.

In the bottom drawer of his desk sat a phone he had kept charged for two years and never once heard ring. It had arrived the week his grandfather, Prince Florian, suffered the stroke that ended his reign. The old man had abdicated from a hospital bed and passed the crown to Lucien, and Lucien had accepted it on a single condition. His uncle, Prince Casimir, would govern as Regent, and Lucien would stay in Harbridge to finish what he and Zara had started. Valmorre would have its ruler in name, and he would keep his promise.

At eleven forty, the drawer began to buzz.

He stared at it through two full rings before he opened the drawer and answered. For a moment there was only breathing on the line, slow and labored, the sound of a man fighting for each word. "Grandfather," Lucien said. "Is that you?"

Then his grandfather spoke, his voice thin and rasping, nothing like the voice Lucien remembered.

"I'm dying, Lucien. Come home. Don't tell your uncle you're coming."