WORTHLESS SON-IN-LAW IS THE KING OF DYNASTY

Chapter 3

Flashback — Fifteen Years Earlier, Paris, 14th Arrondissement

The apartment had smelled of turpentine and old paper, which was how it always smelled when his mother was working. She was a restorationist — patient, methodical, capable of extraordinary attention to something that most people would have discarded as beyond saving. Lucas, fourteen years old, sitting at the kitchen table with his homework spread around him, had always found it a comfort: the idea that damaged things could be returned to what they had been.

His father was in the next room, speaking on the phone in the low, careful voice that meant the conversation was important and the outcome was not certain.

Lucas had not been meant to hear what followed. The walls in that apartment were thin, and his father's voice, however carefully modulated, had a carrying quality. He heard fragments. The estate. The succession. The question of whether Lucas — named at his mother's insistence, over Henri's objections, for a great-uncle the old man had loathed — could be regarded as a legitimate heir, given the circumstances of his parents' marriage.

Then: Henri's voice, thin through the phone's speaker, flat and final.

"The boy is a complication. I have Édouard. Arrange it quietly."

His father had said something. Henri had not changed his position.

Lucas had gone very still over his homework. He had written, in careful script, a formula for a geometry problem he had already known the answer to, and told himself the tightness in his chest was hunger, and not the sound of a door shutting somewhere deep inside him.

His mother had come to the kitchen doorway later, paint on her hands, something in her expression that said she also knew, and that she was furious, and that she was going to protect him from this even if it broke her.

She had managed, for seven years. Then a diagnosis, swift and unkind. And then he had been alone, and the door in his chest had calcified into something he had decided to call self-sufficiency.

End of Flashback

* * * *

"How did he find me?" Lucas asked. They were on the périphérique, the city unwinding behind them, the Bentley moving south.

Sébastien, seated beside him with the quiet composure of a man used to long journeys, turned slightly. "A private investigator. It took several years. You had, if I may say so, made yourself quite difficult to trace."

"I wasn't hiding."

"No. But you had removed yourself entirely from any world he might have thought to look in." A pause. "That was, I suspect, not entirely accidental."

Lucas said nothing. It was true. He had spent the years after his mother's death carefully inhabiting only spaces that the Moreau world would not notice. State university. A rented room. A marriage into a family that was comfortable but not connected. He had not done it consciously — or he had, and refused to admit it.

"What does he want?" he asked.

"To apologise. To correct a wrong. To give you what should have been yours." Sébastien folded his hands in his lap. "He has Édouard, as you may know. Your cousin. Twenty-six years old. He has been groomed for succession for the better part of a decade."

"Then what does he need me for?"

A careful pause. "Édouard is talented at certain things. He is very good at appearing to be exactly what is required of him in any given room. He is less good at the things your grandfather actually values — judgment, integrity, the capacity to absorb setback without becoming destructive." Sébastien glanced at him. "Henri has watched your cousin for ten years. And he has spent that same ten years thinking about what he sacrificed."

"He sacrificed me," Lucas said, "because I was inconvenient."

"Yes." No equivocation. "He did."

The motorway lights scrolled past. Lucas rested his head back against the leather seat and looked at the ceiling of the car.

"Tell me about my mother's last years," he said quietly.

Sébastien was quiet for a moment. "She wrote to him. Twice. He did not reply to the first letter. By the time he wished to reply to the second — " He stopped.

"She was already gone."

"Yes."

The motorway curved. The city fell entirely away behind them, and the dark countryside opened up on all sides, vast and indifferent.

"He needs to know something," Lucas said.

"What is that?"

"That if I take what he's offering — whatever that is — I am not doing it in gratitude. I am not doing it to forgive him. I am doing it because it is mine. Because it was always mine and it was taken from me, and I intend to have it back. Every part of it."

Sébastien nodded slowly. "I believe he already understands that."

"Then we understand each other."

* * * *

The Moreau estate outside Cannes came into view at nearly midnight — a nineteenth-century bastide rising from terraced gardens, lit from below, pale stone against dark sky. Lucas had never seen it before. He had heard it described, twice, in the kind of voice that people use for things they consider holy: his mother, once, with longing; his father, once, with bitterness.

It was larger than he had imagined. And quieter.

Henri Moreau was in the main salon, wrapped in a blanket, sitting upright in an armchair with the determined posture of a man who refuses to look diminished even when he is. He was small and very old and his eyes, which were the same amber as Lucas's — which Lucas had not known, and which now struck him as either meaningful or simply genetics — were fixed on the doorway.

"You came," Henri said. His voice was thinner than it had been on the phone, the night it came through a wall and told Lucas he was a complication.

"I came," Lucas agreed. He did not move closer immediately. He stood in the doorway and looked at the old man in the chair, and felt nothing he could have put a clean name to — not forgiveness, not hatred, but something compound and old and his.

"You look like your mother," Henri said. Then, after a beat: "She had better judgment than I did. About nearly everything."

"I know."

Henri held out a manila folder. "The Moreau Hospitality Group. Hotels, vineyards, properties along the Riviera. Sébastien will walk you through the valuations. There is a condition — the same one I gave your cousin when he began. You will take the smallest entity first and demonstrate you can lead it. After that, everything transfers."

Lucas crossed the room. Took the folder. Opened it.

"I'm not doing this for you," he said, eyes on the pages.

"I know." Henri's voice, very quiet now. "I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to do it for yourself. Which is what I should have done fifteen years ago — simply let you be what you were going to be, without my interference."

The fire in the grate settled. The room was warm.

Lucas read the documents for a long time. Then he looked up at the old man in the chair.

"I'll need a pen," he said.