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But no. Once he’s gotten permission to fuck off, he does so without much of a fight. Naturally.
Once he’s gone, I ask one of the orderlies for an extra blanket and a pillow, if it isn’t too much trouble. She acts like she’s about to suggest I just go home, but whatever I was able to hide from the family I no longer have the will to keep hidden. She leaves to get me the goods, and I go into Mama’s room to wait for her.
Mama’s still asleep. She’s sedated. I’ve got a few hours to rest before she’s up. And shit, I’ve got a day of planning and tasting and setting up to do tomorrow. That starts about six hours from now. But at least someone will be here when Mama wakes up.
At least she’ll know there’s someone in her life who still gives a shit.
Jake
The hammer falls the next day. I was expecting it, so I’m not surprised when one of my father’s goons meets me in the garage, where I was hoping to avoid my father entirely by leaving the house for a few days.
“Mr. Ferry is looking for you,” Barry tells me, smug. He’s a heavyset guy, ostensibly one of the security personnel on the grounds, though he doesn’t do much securing. He runs “errands” for Reginald.
“I haven’t got a text from him,” I say. “That’s the usual mode of contact. Is his phone dead?”
Barry shrugs. “All I know is he wants to see you.”
“Where at?”
Barry snorts, and points up, as if to heaven itself. “Where do you think?”
The Office, then. Every bit as serious as I expected.
My father doesn’t care for an office setting. His meetings are usually informal, in an environment where he can schmooze and charm and everyone is off guard. But he does have an office. He reserves it for announcing hostile takeovers, firing longtime employees, and tearing new assholes. Just the stuff where he doesn’t feel a need to play nice.
“Fine,” I tell Barry the lackey. “I’m going.”
Barry grins at me with his chipped front tooth. Asshole.
I take the stairs up to the third floor, which has exactly one function — to serve as a massive office with windows on all sides. The floors are made from a single giant redwood Reginald bribed the governor of California to get his paws on. Oiled, polished, and waxed, it makes the floor look stained with blood — which is the point, of course.
My father is waiting behind his desk, looking out over his domain. The estate stretches in all directions around us. Not that anyone’s ever attempted to assassinate my father, but the glass is five inches thick and bulletproof. Never can be too careful.
He doesn’t say a word until I take a seat in one of the uncomfortable, not-quite-big-enough chairs on the victim side of the desk.
“I didn’t tell you to sit,” he says calmly, as he swivels around to look at me, resting his elbows on his massive ebony desk. Not cheap knock-off African blackwood, oh no. Probably whole swaths of Gabon ebony trees — squat little things that never produce a slat of wood longer than a few feet — had to be mowed down to build it. Like everything else in the Office, it is custom-made and handcrafted into something painfully exquisite.
I sigh, and put my two-thousand-dollar Italian leather-clad feet up on it. “If I waited for you to tell me to sit, my feet would be sore by the time this was over. It’ll have the same effect if I sit down.”
At this show of defiance, my father’s eyes narrow, but he makes no other move, says nothing right away. This is what he does; I’ve seen him do it during negotiations, and I’ve been on the receiving end of a number of these dressings-down. I wait for it, imagining a roiling storm cloud gathering in the room above us, thunder rumbling warnings of what’s to come.
“Do you know what you’re worth, Jacob?” he asks me.
I shrug. Honestly, I’m not certain. A hell of a lot. “I don’t, sir,” I tell him. “But I’d guess it’s about — ”
“It’s nothing,” Reginald says softly, dangerously. “You are worth precisely zero dollars.”
“I’ve got five hundred and thirteen dollars in cash in my pocket,” I tell him. I don’t know why. To put up some kind of a fight? Already, I can see where this is going.
Reginald doesn’t laugh at my joke, which I realize moments after it’s out of my mouth is not very funny. “How far in life do you think that will get you?”
“A night at a cheap strip club,” I say. In for a penny…
“All of your stock in my company,” Reginald growls, “your trust funds, your life insurance premiums, even your credit, is connected to my interests and it has been since you were born.”
That’s… actually news to me. I probably should have been more aware of how that was all set up.
“So when I tell you, Jacob,” he goes on, “that I can and will cut you off — I don’t mean that I will stop paying your credit card down. I mean that I will divest you of every single penny to your name. Including the cash in your wallet. It can happen with a single phone call to my CFO, who, by the way, doesn’t like you.”
