16. CHAPTER 14 #5
The reply came fast. Severin style.
Severin: You're rather impatient for a man marrying an asset.
I ignored him. This had nothing to do with impatience and he knew it. Severin always found where to pull enough to tease me or get a response.
Severin: Confirmed. Everything is in place as requested. Routes, checkpoints, personnel rotations. All in-check. My team will do a final run a day before to make sure the location is thoroughly secure.
I stared at Léonie again as the planner spoke, tapping her pen against the clipboard in her hands.
Then I typed, finally asking for the update I’d been waiting on since the day I learned the names of the Fernández security personnel involved in sedating her.
Me: The guards who assisted with sedating her. Did you handle them?
Two dots. Three.
Severin: They have all been taken care of as requested. After targets were terminated from Fernández service last week, they’ve been blacklisted from any of our subsidiaries + partners. They won’t work corporate security again.
Some of the tension in my shoulders eased.
Perfect.
A cold reckoning for sedating Léonie without authorization. They’d touched her without my permission. The thought alone made primal fury rise in me.
On the screen, Léonie accepted a sample bouquet from the planner, bringing it automatically to her nose. She didn’t smell it. Rather she held it there like she knew her opinion made no difference.
I wondered if anyone in that room had looked at her and seen a person instead of a bride-shaped solution.
Severin sent another message.
Severin: How is Uncle Henrik today?
The question hit with a dull weight.
I looked away from the surveillance feed and stared down at the reflective surface of my desk, my reflection faint and distorted in it. The pressure of it all weighting on every feature.
Me: Better than other days.
The understatement felt like drinking liquid lead. I kept typing anyway.
Me: My mother crossed a line. She tried to bring King tomorrow with the estate drafts. Said she wanted signatures “while he still has moments of fluidity.”
There was a longer pause this time.
Severin: Did you stop it?
My thumb stayed over the keyboard. Pondering.
Did you stop it.
With my mother, I wonder what exactly stopping it meant. There was no stopping anything when she was determined. I might have tried to stall it, but she always finds a way to get what she wants eventually.
Me: Yes. Security will turn King away if he comes without my approval.
Me: And I made it clear again for the hundredth time that I wouldn’t take a mistress, or play her games. Not while he’s still breathing.
Or even after. That part was hard to say out loud.
Then Severin, as Severin always did, went for the thing beneath the thing.
Severin: And after? If she keeps pushing?
Damn Severin. I glanced back at the screen.
Léonie’s head turned to the side now, her eyes fixed on nothing while the planner kept talking. Her expression didn’t change, but the distance in her gaze deepened, like she’d stepped back inside herself to survive.
My mother saw that kind of distance and called it weakness.
I knew better. Distance was protection. It was how you stayed whole when everyone else was trying to tear a piece off you. I’d lived behind that kind of wall long enough to recognize it in her.
Me: Then she’ll learn the limits of my patience.
Me: And so will the board.
Severin's next reply was careful, leaving the rest unsaid.
Severin: Keep me in the loop. Whatever you need.
I thought of typing a reply, but stopped myself.
What I needed wasn’t something a cousin could provide. It wasn’t security, or leverage, or even loyalty.
I needed time.
Time for my father's health to stabilize. For the girl on the screen to look up and stop pretending she was already dead. And for my mother to understand that if she tried to turn my life into an insurance policy, she'd find out what it felt like to be on the wrong side of a Kade calculation.
On the screen, the planner finished speaking and I saw Léonie lift her eyes. They still looked distant, but mixed with fury now. Her obvious anger wasn’t toward the planner, or anyone in the room. It was at the not so distant future we were about to share. The future she clearly detested.
My mother’s warning seeped like poison into my skin, but it only succeded in fine-tuning my resolve.
I expanded the screen and watched her the way one watches a vault in a burning building, calculating exactly how much skin I was willing to lose to ensure that what was inside stayed mine.
“My mother thinks I’ll break you,” I said, the words intended for the empty room.
I wouldn't.
I planned to build a fortress around her. And if I was the monster at the gates, then at least she was safe from everyone else. Including her family. Everyone except me.
I turned the audio on. Just for a second... maybe a minute… to hear her voice.
Léonie didn’t speak.
She only nodded again, once, as though obedience was the last thing she had left to weaponize.
I shut the audio off, and just stared at the feed.