WORTHLESS SON-IN-LAW IS THE KING OF DYNASTY

Chapter 4

His phone rang at seven-fifteen the next morning. He was already awake, dressed, standing at the window of the room Sébastien had shown him to — a corner room with a view of the terraced gardens and, beyond them, the pale beginning of the sea — and looking at the documents he had read three times already.

He looked at the screen. Céleste.

He answered.

"Where are you?" Her voice was strange — not quite concerned, not quite demanding. Somewhere in between. The voice of someone recalibrating.

"Not in Paris."

"My father has been asking for you. He wants some kind of — I don't know, debrief, I suppose. About the divorce. He thinks you should come and discuss it properly so there are no complications."

"There won't be complications. The papers were clean."

"Lucas." A pause. The rain in Paris, audible faintly through the phone. "I know things weren't perfect. I know I wasn't — but you could have said something. You could have tried harder to — "

He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at his own reflection in the black screen of his laptop.

"Céleste," he said, keeping his voice level, "I tried for three years. I cooked for your family. I deferred to your father's opinions at every dinner table. I absorbed every comment your mother made about my failings and said nothing, because I was trying to preserve something I believed was worth preserving."

Silence.

"The divorce was the right decision. I wish you well, genuinely. But don't call this number again to discuss your parents' need for closure. That's not mine to provide."

Another silence. Then: "You're different."

"I'm exactly the same," he said. "You just never looked."

He ended the call.

* * * *

Sébastien appeared at the door at eight with coffee, a croissant, and the precise, unhurried manner of a man who understood that new beginnings were best begun with breakfast.

"Shall we go over the Cannes property?" he asked.

"We should go to Paris first," Lucas said. "The Moreau property there — the Montparnasse hotel, the one that's been underperforming for two years according to the statements. That's where I want to start."

Sébastien paused, cup halfway raised. "Most heirs begin with the flagship."

"Most heirs are trying to impress. I'm trying to understand." Lucas set down his own cup. "A flagship tells you what a company wants to be. An underperforming property tells you what it actually is. I'd rather start with the truth."

Sébastien set down his cup with a small, contained smile. "Your grandfather said you would either be very good at this or very destructive."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Lucas said.

* * * *

They reached Paris by early afternoon. The Hôtel Moreau Montparnasse was a 1930s building on the Boulevard du Montparnasse that had, at some point in the last decade, forgotten what it was. The lobby had been renovated twice in conflicting styles. The restaurant had no coherent identity. The staff moved with the slightly defeated air of people who had been managed by a succession of caretakers, none of whom had stayed long enough to matter.

The general manager, a man named Théodore, met them at the door with the nervous energy of someone who had received thirty minutes' notice of the new heir's arrival.

"Monsieur Moreau. What an honour. We've prepared — "

"Don't prepare anything," Lucas said pleasantly. "Walk me through it exactly as it is."

Théodore blinked.

"Exactly as it is," Lucas repeated. "Occupancy rates, customer reviews, staff turnover in the last eighteen months, the outstanding maintenance issues your facilities manager has been pushing for approval on for six months." He had read the operational file on the drive up. "I'd like to hear the honest version, not the presentation version. I won't fire anyone for telling me the truth. I might fire someone for the alternative."

Théodore's expression underwent a rapid recalibration.

"Of course," he said, and began.

Two hours later, Lucas sat in the general manager's office with a notepad full of observations and a much clearer sense of what he was working with. The hotel was not badly run — it was directionlessly run. Three years of interim management had left it without a voice, without an ethos, without a reason for a guest to choose it over any of a dozen competitors in the same quartier.

"Call the department heads together," Lucas said. "All of them. Thirty minutes."

Théodore moved to the door, then paused. "Monsieur Moreau — if I may. We were told there might be significant changes. Some of the staff are — "

"Afraid," Lucas said.

"Yes."

"Tell them I'm not here to diminish what they've built under difficult conditions. I'm here to give it a direction." He looked at the window, the rooftops of the 14th arrondissement, the faint grey sky. "They kept this place alive. I intend to make it worth keeping."

* * * *

That evening, alone in the hotel suite he had taken rather than returning to the Beaumont district, Lucas opened his laptop and began to make a second set of notes. Not about the hotel.

He wrote three names at the top of a clean page: Gérard Beaumont. Margaux Beaumont. Olivier Marchand.

Not with anger — the anger had cooled, or rather, it had refined itself into something more precise and more patient. He wrote the names with the clinical attention of a man who has decided to understand his opponents before he dismantles them.

Gérard's development company was over-leveraged. That much was in the public filings. Three projects, all in the outer arrondissements, all dependent on a planning approval that was, according to a contact Sébastien had mentioned, far from certain.

He closed the laptop.

Not yet. There was work to do first — real work, the kind that would build the foundation from which everything else would become possible. Revenge, he had decided, was not a sprint. It was architecture. You had to build something substantial before you could use it to bring down something else.

He slept better than he had in three years.