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Power comes at a price.
The biggest one was my humanity.
The issue is, I’m not sure I can blame that one solely on power. No, I think lies chipped away at me mercilessly until all that was left was a husk.
Now, I sit at the head of a business I watched grow, where I learned the tricks of the trade and grew formidable in the corner, unwatched and untouched. It seems like everyone is watching nowadays. They’re all waiting for me to take to my spot with full effect, but they don’t know that the true beauty of power is while it comes at a price, it comes with choices.
I now get to choose when to exert dominance, and I choose to do it when people least expect it, because what is better than letting people get comfortable, only to have everything ripped away?
Of course, that’s not how my father wants it done. But he handed the keys to the kingdom over to me only yesterday, and I don’t intend to let him think for one second he has a right to tell me how to run the game now.
He used to make the rules, now I do.
I observe him across the desk. He’s peeling through sheets of paper, digesting the information fleetingly, but I scrutinize every look on his face.
Clearing my throat, I’m careful with my tactic. I rub my jaw thoughtfully before setting my hand back onto the arm of my chair.
“Do you even miss him?”
I’ve been left reeling on this since they declared Nicolas was dead.
“Of course I do.”
The response is blunt, the tone curt. He doesn’t look away from the paperwork. Doesn’t even lose his pace for a second.
With great power comes great control – that is the second lesson of power.
Alistair Knight never wavers from control, never missing a beat even in the midst of confrontation.
“Do you think you could at least start acting like it, then?” I goad sharply. “You always used to call him your brother, but the ink was barely dry on his death certificate, and you were out laughing like bad shit didn’t just happen.”
“Beckett-”
The warning tone does very little to disperse my feeling on the matter.
“Sixty-two years of friendship,” I state, grinding the words out as if they’re rocks, the weight of them all important. “Sixty-two-fucking-years, and you recover like you lost a fucking pen.”
Sighing heavily, my father allows the paperwork to fall into a pile before he sets it on the desk between us, the weight slamming onto the darkened mahogany. Eyes, darker than mine, regard me with slight impatience.
“We’re not doing this,” he states, standing up.
“Yes, we are.”
I match him stance for stance. He may be my father, but age isn’t doing him any favours, and his seventy years compared to my thirty is no contest. I even move around the table, going straight for the minibar in the room because I know where this is going. Bourbon won’t even soften the blow, but it’s a good start.
“What do you want me to do? Go and fall on his grave? Cry over his gravestone? Be beside myself?” My father rolls his eyes with derision. “Yes, Nicolas and I were friends for a very long time, and yes, I valued him more like family than anything else, but emotions get you nowhere, Beckett.”
“I’m not asking you to be an emotional wreck, but pay some fucking respect.”
A hand comes to the back of my neck, the grasp strong, pressing onto the nerves around my spine. Slowly, I set the tumbler down, crystal clinking with metal as I do so. I know this stance. I’ve been held in my father’s grip too many times in my life to forget.
Except now, he forgets our roles are reversed.
With great power comes great responsibility. Lesson three.
“Get your hands off me.”
“You listen here, boy,” he chides, uttering the nickname he always uses to belittle me. His grip tightens, arthritis beginning to steal his full strength. “You have no right to speak to me the way you do, and if it continues, I’ll-”
