16. CHAPTER 14 #3
“What implications?” I asked, my hands curling around my knee cap under my desk. “He is still breathing. His heart is beating. And you want to put a pen in his hand so we can save a few percentage points on the inheritance?”
“I am ensuring your future,” she countered, finally meeting my eyes.
Her eyes were unaffectionate, filled with the cold detachment she was never afraid to show. “It’s what your father would expect of me.”
“He would expect us to fight for him,” I retorted.
“I am fighting for the empire,” she returned in an icy calm tone that sent a chill through me, followed by a thick and suffocating silence that seemed to engulf the office.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d always prioritized optics over everything else. Keeping up appearances was her thing. Had always been.
Still something in me fractured anyway. Because she was doing what I couldn’t bear to imagine—picturing a world where Henrik Kade didn’t exist.
A world where the backbone I leaned on simply…wasn’t.
A future without my father; and all I could see was total darkness.
And a part of me, a small part I didn’t want to recognise heard her words, and wondered if I'd misunderstood my father all along.
Had Henrik raised me to fight for him… or to fight solely for what he built?
Was I being sentimental?
I’ve been called many things but sentimental has never been one of them. Yet, here I was pondering the difference between a son and a successor, and realising I might just be failing at both.
I held her gaze, and for the first time in a long time, the coldness I’d always known in her looked different. It felt fiercer, less human even.
It made me pause to think. Not about her, or even about my father, but about myself.
About my marriage, and what it meant to be unheld in this family.
I wasn't raised to believe in love or the phantom power it might hold. I’d seen it treated as a structural weakness, a crack in the foundation. But what exists in the void where love should be? A legacy of possession?
Because if I were the one in that bed, I realized with a kind of sick clarity… I would want someone to hold on longer. I would want someone who saw the future and still refused to live in it without me.
Unlike my mother who already lived comfortably in the future, without the man she built a life with.
She let out a bored sigh. “Don’t be naive, mon c?ur. The board is skittish. They see your father's heart failing, and they see you untested in a crisis of this magnitude. They worry about a vacuum.”
“I am the vacuum’s solution,” I shot back. “I’ve secured the Fernández alliance, stabilized Ironshore—”
“On paper,” she interrupted. “But today, the board isn’t looking at the numbers. They’re looking at the dying man in the east wing.”
She rose from the sofa and stepped closer. Her perfume—musky, floral, and invasive, filled my lungs.
“They’re discussing contingency plans,” she placed the cup of tea on a saucer with a clink at the corner of my desk.
“They won’t hand you control of both kingdoms simply because you wore a tuxedo and shook hands today.
They want permanence. Proof that the Kade line won’t end with a car crash or a sudden illness. ”
My jaw locked.
“You’re talking about an heir.” I narrowed my eyes. “Even before I’m married?”
“I am talking about safeguarding your legacy,” she said, too smoothly. “If you want to manage her family’s assets along with ours, you need a successor in the cradle. It proves you’re a founder, not a temporary steward. It’s how you win the full trust of the board.”
Finally, her cards are on the table. This was the angle all along. The perfect pressure point to get me to bend and do her bidding.
“And let me guess,” I said, bitterness rising like bile, “you suggested this guarantee to the chairman of the board.”
She didn’t flinch. “I am ensuring that when your father’s heart finally stops, the market doesn’t even feel a tremor. If you want the throne, Orion, you must provide the prince. Consider it the final cost of the merger.”
When your father’s heart finally stops.
She said it with the same casual detachment she might use to discuss the swatches for new living room curtains.
Provide the prince. Her elegant euphemism for take a mistress, produce a backup heir, secure the optics.
My stomach hollowed.
A mistress wasn’t indulgence. It was insurance.
In simple terms, I could have Léonie’s body on one side, another woman of my mother’s choosing on the other. Options, like property.
A numbness moved through me, slow and sickening. I'd included the heir clause to punish Fernández on one hand, and on the other to make sure a full merger happens. It was safer that way for business.
My mother’s plans were far more sinister and calculated. She wasn't just managing a transition; she was laying a siege.
Right then, I felt the urge to burn the bridge before she could cross it.
Heat flared across my chest, subdued only by restraint I'd spent years mastering.
I could see it clearly now. My mother would never let Léonie’s attempted escape slide.
She'd punish her for daring to make the Kade name her second choice.
And she would punish me for letting it happen.
For defying her when I refused the pregnancy test, when I refused to end the engagement and insisted on marrying Léonie.
So this was her punishment.
“This,” I said slowly, “is you trying to force my hand into taking a mistress.”
She tilted her head, almost indulgent. “You need to be wise about this, Orion. The wedding is in two weeks, but contingencies must be considered. If Léonie doesn’t get pregnant at the first try… you’ll have options. We need the board’s full confidence while your father is still with us.”
I stared at her. It was then I understood something that made my stomach turn.
My father had always reined her in. Not because he loved her—Henrik didn’t operate on love—but because he understood restraint as a form of control.
Now he was incapacitated, she was out in the field. Unsupervised. Unhinged. Unchallenged.
And somehow she’d thought she could use the crisis as a front to decide things for me. To make me a puppet. Forgetting I’m my father’s son and that Kades don't surrender their territory without a bloodbath.
I bolstered my posture, straightening in the heavy leather chair until the height of it framed me.
I interlaced my fingers over the desk in a deliberate, grounding movement.
Then, I looked directly at her, locking onto her cold gaze with a new, ruthless focus.
Leaning far enough into the light that she could see the lack of hesitation in my eyes.
"You've been very busy, Mère," I said, my voice dropping an octave. “But my answer is no.”
Her brow pulled together as if I’d inconvenienced her.
“You don’t understand what’s at stake—”
“I understand exactly what’s at stake,” I cut in without raising my voice. “And you are not going to use my father’s damaged body as leverage for your comfort.”
Her lips pressed together, her brows lifting.
“Rion—”
“No,” I repeated, pushing forward now, forcing her to look up at me the way board members did when they realized the majority share had just changed hands.
“You will not bring King into this house tomorrow. You will not put papers in my father’s face like he’s already gone.
You will not speak about his heart stopping as if it’s a calendar event you need notifications for. ”
Her gaze cooled. “You don’t get to—”
“I get to,” I didn't let her finish, my voice flat and final.
"I'm the one holding the line, standing between this family and the chaos brewing outside. And if you’re so desperate for a seamless transition, you will learn something now. You do not create stability by preemptively burying the man who built it.”
She held my gaze in silence, and I could see the calculation I was used to behind her eyes. The way she weighed risks and reputations the way other women weighed love.
She tried again, softer. “This is what your father would want.”
I inclined towards her, lowering my voice until it became intimate.
“No,” I said. “This is what you want.”
Her mouth pressed tight. For once, I watched a retort die behind her lips before it could ever reach the air.
“And as for mistresses—” I , letting each word fall as hard as I meant them to be.
“I told you once. I’ll tell you again. I will marry one wife.
That is it. I'm not meeting anyone at the governor’s ball.
Not the nieces, or the heiresses, or the girls you’re trying to parade in front of me like commodities. ”
Her eyes cut toward me. “Don’t be crude.”
“Don’t be dishonest,” I returned.
Without hesitating I pressed a button on the intercom.
“Security,” I said calmly. “I want a standing instruction: no legal counsel enters the estate without my direct approval. That includes King, and anyone from his office. If my mother schedules them, they’re turned away.”
I watched Esmé go perfectly still. Speechless.
The power shift happened seamlessly. There could only be one captain steering the ship, especially now that the family patriarch was incapacitated. There was no way I was giving my mother control to wreck whatever she liked.
Satisfaction coursed through me. It felt like a closed door only I had a key to.
“You’re embarrassing me,” she said, her french lilt picking up.
“I’m saving you,” I replied. “From forgetting your place.”
Her eyes sharpened into a dangerous, affronted gaze.
“And where is that?” she asked.
I held her gaze.
“On the other side of my decisions.”
For a long moment, she remained statuesque, and I couldn’t tell if my defiance had actually landed or if she was already calculating the cost of my rebellion. Then she released a weary, thin breath—the sound of someone dealing with a tiresome delay—and turned toward the door without a word.
Before she left, she looked back, her eyes glittering with something that wasn’t quite anger. More of an assessment.
“You’ve become just like him.”