16. CHAPTER 14 #2
From where I stood now, he looked smaller than usual. A lion buried under anesthesia and plastic tubing.
“How long?” I asked.
“To get back to where we were?” Gérard considered. “A week. Maybe two. We have to wait for the swelling to go down.”
I finally turned from the glass and faced him fully. People had told me my gaze could be unsettling; Henrik had trained it that way. Gérard shifted his weight, his fingers locked on the tablet.
“I’m paying for a forward trajectory, Doctor,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I don’t pay for baselines, and I certainly don’t pay for waiting. If the current medication is causing spikes, find a different approach. A better chemistry. Rewire the protocol. Do everything within your power.”
And beyond if needed.
“Orion.” His voice carried a warning and a personal note from the familiarity we’ve built over the year I’ve known him. “He’s seventy-four. His body is trying to tell us something.”
“His body doesn’t have a vote here,” I snapped.
Gérard flinched. I'd said it too harshly.
The composure I’d been holding onto gave way, and rage pushed through, threaded with a dangerous desperation.
“I'm the one who decides when this project is over,” I said, forcing precision into every word, because precision was all I had left. “Keep him stable. Get him back to the point where he can hold a pen. Everything else is irrelevant.”
Gérard looked like he wanted to argue, then he glanced past me at Henrik and reconsidered.
“I’ll adjust the protocol,” he conceded.
“I know you will.”
I left before he could say anything else that sounded like defeat. I wasn’t equipped to handle anything less than victory today. A more positive outlook was all I needed to push through the rest of the day. At least that was what I was holding on to.
But as I made my way back to my side of the estate, the walk felt longer than usual, though everything else remained the same. The smell of lilies trailing the pathway, my mother's favourites and her way of reminding the house that she was still in charge.
The polished marble floor that spanned the entire space, the art on the walls that cost more than most people's apartments. Nothing had changed.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the faint hum of a vacuum, then the buzz of the lawn mower.
Everything in its place, functioning at its scheduled time. Life going on as it should.
I went straight to my office, shut the door, and tore at my tie until it came loose. It hit the desk first, then the back of the chair, then the floor. I didn’t care where it landed.
I stood in the middle of the room. My chest felt heavy, my lungs dragging in air as if I’d sprinted across the city instead of down a long hallway.
Fear gripped me tight at the collar—the same dread that had held me in a chokehold since my father fell into a coma.
It never really left me. It had engraved itself so deeply in my chest that purging it seemed impossible.
I moved to the tall window, and braced my palm on the glass.
Outside, a lone groundskeeper crossed the lawn with a rake slung over his shoulder, his shadow forming a small dark figure against the well manicured green.
He stopped to clear a patch of leaves near one of the old oaks, his head bent diligently to his work.
“The grounds would outlive us all.” I thought to myself. The house would, too. A daunting reality.
The Kade estate had stood for generations. My father grew up within these walls. I was born in them. Our name is carved into everything—contracts, offshore accounts, and into the very stones of these walls. On paper, we were permanent, but reality didn’t care about paper.
All it took was one failing body connected to a machine for the illusion to shatter. Suddenly, everything felt far less permanent than I’d been raised to believe. The legacy I was born to uphold now slipping through my grip no matter how tightly I closed my hand.
A plateau. The word hadn't left me since Dr. Gérard said it.
Everything I’d relied on was suddenly hollow. The numbers in my accounts—the billions propping up the Kade name—suddenly looked like play-money. Colorful, weightless figures with no real power. Useless in the one place I actually needed leverage.
All that wealth, and I couldn't buy a single millisecond of my father’s soul back from the dark.
A cold, dark pressure spread in my aching chest. It wasn’t deep enough to be grief and it wasn’t the fear either. It was the terror of the empty chair.
The chair he wielded with the absolute gravity of a king. The one I was unable to fully own, considering I’d been warming it up for weeks.
Outwardly, I looked confident, but deep within me, the fear of stepping in his shoes lived and thrived in my bones every fucking day.
My eyes moved to the corner of the office, beside the decanter. A picture of my father and me at my first polo match sat there. I stared at it as if I could relive the day.
I pushed my hands in pocket of my trousers to ground myself.
The pride in his eyes was the reason I framed it. It reminded me of how proud he was of me, even in the moments when I thought I was failing him. Looking at it today didn’t bring any comfort.
The truth was if Henrik died, there’d be no one left to look at me and see a son. There’d be shareholders and rivals and allies who were only loyal to their own margins. There'd be my mother, who had always treated me like a checkbox in her social portfolio.
There would be the empire our ancestors built, but not the man who’d upheld it gracefully till this point with all his might.
I pressed my forehead on the glass as the pressure in my chest expanded into a deeper ache.
My reflection stared back. Expensive. Controlled. Utterly useless.
I needed the machines and the science behind it to work.
The metrics to move from red back to green, charts climbing, percentages improving, neurons reconnecting.
Because if I couldn’t fix my father…if all the power the Kade name had accumulated couldn’t hold him here, then every deal I’d made, every alliance I’d signed, every ruthless decision I’d justified in the name of legacy…
was nothing more than a beautifully tailored lie.
And I refused to inherit a lie.
The lawn blurred under the sweep of the groundskeeper’s rake, and for a moment I wasn’t staring at the estate at all.
I was eleven again, standing in the suffocating silence of my father’s study in the east wing.
One of the evenings when he’d summon me to quiz me about my lessons.
That day he’d told me to choose a pen from his desk to practice my script.
I reached for a lacquered ebony case, its velvet interior cradling the pens like expensive pieces of jewelry.
I picked one, my chest swelling with a brief, childish pride.
“Not that one,” Henrik had said without looking up. “That one has a tendency to leak. A man should always choose tools that don’t betray him.”
He reached for the obsidian rest, sliding a silver-capped pen toward me. It was imposingly heavy. I remember how it felt in my small hand, how the weight steadied me, and his fingers held mine firmly to communicate something he never said aloud: Be strong. Don’t falter. Don’t embarrass me.
I blinked, the memory collapsing as the present intruded sound of clicking heels and the door swinging open without a knock.
As usual she didn’t knock.
“Now that the alliance is in motion and the wedding date is finalized,” my mother announced as she swept into my office like she owned the air circulating the room, “you should be focusing on positioning other things.”
I didn’t turn. “Hello to you as well.”
She ignored that.
I walked to my chair and settled in. I could tell she was in one of her moods, and I knew that whatever she was about to say was going to grate against my raw nerves.
“I know you detest society events,” she continued, gliding toward the sofa as though the universe bent to her will, “but the governor’s ball is coming up, and the nieces of Lady de Gautier and Lady Lavigne are in town.
They’re the most talked about heiresses and very promising matches for any young man smart enough not to squander opportunity.
You only need to attend the ball to see for yourself. ”
Matches. Mistresses. My mother’s most favorite words. They seemed to leave her mouth effortlessly anytime we talked.
I took a moment.
“Mother, I told you already… I’m not interested in meeting anyone.”
She stared at me like I’d announced I was planning to join a monastery. “Don’t be absurd.”
She crossed her legs, perfectly elegant, perfectly unaffected. “We have a crisis, in case you haven’t noticed.”
The air in the room crystallized.
“I’ve contacted your father’s lawyer,” she said, lifting a delicate porcelain cup from the tea tray—my tea tray, in my office—with the same effortless flair she used when selecting accessories.
“He’ll be here tomorrow with the final drafts of your father’s estate papers.
Henrik was mid-revision before the stroke.
It’s only logical to finalise signatures while he still has… moments of fluidity.”
I glanced at her fully then. She didn’t look like a woman whose husband was critically ill. She looked like a woman waiting for a flight that had been slightly delayed.
“Finalize?” I repeated the words, my voice low. “He’s in a recovery protocol, Mother. Not in hospice care.”
She maintained her stance. “The truth is that he’s dying, Orion. Let’s not be sentimental about these things.”
The room felt cold and deathly silent except for the sound of tea filling her cup.
Rage, grief, disbelief all twisting together in my gut.
She continued casually, stirring her tea. “The transition of power must be seamless. The board is already whispering. If he passes with an open-ended will, the implications could be catastrophic.”
As expected. It was always about power and control. The only languages she knew.