WORTHLESS SON-IN-LAW IS THE KING OF DYNASTY

Chapter 1

"Another door closed," Lucas murmured to himself, loosening the top button of his shirt as he turned off the Rue de Rivoli and walked toward the Beaumont townhouse. The collar had begun to chafe somewhere around midday, when the interview panel had thanked him for his time in the particular tone reserved for candidates they would not be calling back.

He had prepared for six weeks. He had researched the firm's portfolio, modelled three years of projected growth, and rehearsed his answers so thoroughly that they had begun to feel less like responses and more like recitations. None of it had mattered. Somewhere between his surname — unremarkable — and his address — the Beaumont residence, recognisable to anyone in Paris's social strata as a comfortable but distinctly unfashionable postcode — the panel had already made their decision.

He stopped at the gate and stood there for a moment, looking at the cream-painted façade of the building that was not his home. The brass knocker. The box hedge, trimmed to a geometry that his mother-in-law, Margaux, considered a statement of character. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth.

Then he pushed open the door.

The entrance hall smelled of beeswax and cold cut flowers. Margaux had very particular opinions about cut flowers: they ought to be white, they ought to be fresh, and they ought to be replaced the moment they showed the slightest softening. Lucas had, on more than one occasion, been sent back to the florist for a second trip because the first arrangement had not met the standard.

Céleste was in the sitting room, shoes off, legs tucked beneath her on the cream sofa, scrolling through her phone with the practiced indifference of someone who had learned very early that the best way to end a conversation was to appear to be in the middle of a more important one.

She looked up briefly. Her eyes registered him the way they registered furniture — present, noted, unremarkable.

"Well?" she said.

"No." He set his portfolio on the side table. "They said they'd be in touch, but — "

"But they won't." She looked back at her phone.

"Céleste — "

"Lucas, this is the fourth one. Why are you so worthless?" Her voice was not unkind, which somehow made it worse. Unkindness could be argued with. This tone — measured, faintly bored could not be. "At some point, you have to consider that perhaps the problem isn't the interviews."

He said nothing. He had learned to say nothing. In the beginning, he had argued, had presented evidence of systemic biases in hiring, had pointed to his academic record, his language skills, his actual competence. None of it had changed the temperature in the room. Eventually he had understood that Céleste did not want him to be right. She wanted him to be better — where better meant richer, better-connected, more useful to a specific vision of her life that he had somehow stopped fitting.

He went to the kitchen.

He had become, over three years of this marriage, an exceptionally good cook. Not because anyone had praised him for it, but because it was the one hour in the day when the noise in his head stopped and the world reduced to heat, timing, and the quiet satisfaction of something done well. He took the ingredients from the refrigerator, washed them methodically, and began.

By the time Margaux came home, the kitchen smelled of roast chicken with tarragon and a light potato gratin that had turned exactly the right shade of gold.

She walked in without removing her coat, as though staying were beneath her, and lifted the lid of the casserole dish with the air of a health inspector.

"Is there cream in this?" she asked.

"A little, for the gratin."

"I told you last week I was avoiding dairy." She replaced the lid with a small, pointed click. "Three years, Lucas. You'd think you could remember one thing."

"Margaux — "

"Don't call me Margaux." She turned, finally removing her coat, handing it to him as though he were the coat rack. "You've not earned informal. Not in this house."

He took the coat. Hung it. Did not look at her.

The evening ground forward in the way that bad evenings do — slowly and with purpose. Gérard came home at seven, smelling of wine and the particular satisfaction of a man who had spent the afternoon convincing himself he was important. He sat at the head of the table, unfolded his napkin, and surveyed the meal with an expression that managed to communicate both appetite and disapproval.

"Any news on the job front?" he asked, not looking at Lucas.

"Not yet."

"Mm." Gérard speared a piece of potato. "A man with your degree and your time ought to be finding something. Unless the degree isn't worth what it claims to be." He said it pleasantly, the way one discusses weather.

Lucas's fork paused above his plate. He felt the familiar heat behind his sternum — the anger he had been banking for three years, layered and compressed like sediment, growing heavier by degrees.

"The market is competitive," he said.

"The market is competitive for everyone," Gérard agreed. "Some people navigate it better than others." A pause, loaded with implication. "Céleste works. Margaux built her consultancy from nothing. Even the girl at the corner tabac has managed to maintain employment."

"Gérard," Céleste said. Not to defend Lucas — simply because the dinner-table performance was beginning to bore her.

Lucas set down his fork, excused himself quietly, and went upstairs.

* * * *

The bedroom they shared had not felt shared for some time. He slept on his side of it with a precision that had, he now understood, less to do with courtesy and more to do with the instinct of a man who had been told, in a hundred wordless ways, that he occupied too much space.

He sat on the edge of the bed. Céleste's phone was on the nightstand, screen down. It buzzed twice, in quick succession — the particular rhythm of someone expecting a reply.

He should not have looked. He knew he should not have looked. He looked.

The screen lit for a fraction of a second before it went dark again, but the preview was enough. He saw two things: a name he didn't recognise — Olivier — and the tail end of a message that contained enough warmth to tell him everything the name did not.

He set the phone back. Screen down. Exactly as he'd found it.

He went to the window and looked out at the dark courtyard, the neat box hedges, the life that had been designed around him rather than with him.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I'll know for certain. And then we'll see.

* * * *

He did not sleep well. He lay in the dark and listened to Céleste breathe, and thought about what it means to be told you are nothing so many times that you start to believe it — and what it might mean to stop believing it.

The anger was still there. It always was. But tonight it had a different quality: cooler, more directed. Less like a fire and more like a compass needle, swinging toward true north for the first time.

He did not know, yet, what was waiting for him. He did not know about the Bentley or the silver-haired man or the estate outside Cannes. He did not know that his grandfather — the patriarch he had been told, as a child, wanted nothing to do with him — had spent fifteen years searching.

All he knew was that something had broken tonight, quietly and completely, in the manner of a thing that had been cracking for years.

He closed his eyes. Tomorrow, he thought again.

And for the first time in a long time, tomorrow felt like something other than more of the same.