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Where the fuck is she? I push my hair away from my face; I drink an entire bottle of water. I push myself through a list of instructions. Hydrate, eat. Call Woodrow. He answers almost immediately.
“Mr Fletcher-Lowe! Are you alright?”
“Ned, I’m fine. What is it, what’s happened?”
“Sir, I—I’m on my way now.” Woodrow pauses. “Your father is with me.”
“Right.”
I hang up, throw on some clothes and leave my bedroom. The first place I check is Willow’s room. It’s a disaster as usual. The window is still open from when I found her smoking when I went to give the code to my office before everything went so terribly off-plan.
There are shopping bags, shoes and clothes lying everywhere, books stacked on the bedside table. I check under her mattress, where she’s been keeping her little treasures. Her notebook, cigarettes, keys, my newly acquired eighteenth-century copy ofThe Divine Comedy. They’re all gone.
My heart feels like a cold weight in my chest, frozen still and unfeeling. I leave Willow’s bedroom and go to my office. I know she’s not going to be there; I’m not even surprised whenI push open the door to find the room ransacked. Filing cabinet drawers ripped open, monitors and computers smashed in.
The whiteboard has been unhurriedly erased, photos strewn across the floor. Instead of my notes on Willow and the Young Kings, there’s a message scrawled in red ink.
HERE’S YOUR PROOF, FUCKER.
SEE YOU IN HELL.
LOVE,
WILLOW.
The wordloveis underlined.
I stand in front of the whiteboard for a long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. And then I slump forward, resting the side of my face against the whiteboard, my cheek pressed against the red of Willow’s name.
Later, when my fatherand Woodrow get here, I sit on the couch with my face resting on my fist while my father paces in front of me, Woodrow standing to one side with a crestfallen expression. My father didn’t speak when he arrived, he just threw a print proof copy ofThe Royal Observeron my lap, where it lands with the front page title screaming up at me.
“PRINCE OF DARKNESS: How Luca Fletcher-Lowe Built an Empire of Blackmail and Corruption.”
I pick up the newspaper, throw it a dispassionate glance. Looking at it makes me feel nothing at all. I toss it aside. “I don’t need to read it.”
My father stops in his tracks, fixes me with a hard look. “No, you already know what it says, don’t you?”
I nod. Everything I stand accused of, I did. I’m not the kind of man to baulk at my own actions. No mirror could ever make me flinch at my own reflection.
“You know there’sevidencein there?” My father’s tone is clipped. He’s not a man prone to fits of anger. His emotions have always run cold. Yet there’s a vein twitching in his forehead. “Names, dates, photographs?”
“Yes.”
Behind him, Woodrow’s shoulders slump.
My father stares at me. He says nothing for a long moment, eyes searching my face. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him like this. Not angry or frightened or devastated.Confused.
“Luca,” he says dully. “How the fuck did you let this happen?”
“I lost control.” I answer him truthfully, calm now that I’m in the eye of the storm.
My father shakes his head in disbelief. “The article comes outnext week. Do you know how little time this gives us? We need to get on top of thisnow. I’ve already contacted our lawyers, and Ava and her team are putting a statement together. You’re going to need to run an internal investigation, make a big show of it, and you’re going to have no choice but to select some scapegoats and watch heads roll. We’re going to need to arrange meetings, offer settlements. You’re going to lose CHOKE, you know that, right?”
“I know.”
I don’t care. That’s the truth of what I’m feeling; that’s what my father will come to understand, sooner or later. I don’t care, not even a little. I’m going to be dragged through the media circus with a rope around my neck; I’m going to have to bend over for the public and put on a show of humility, regret, philanthropy. I’m going to lose CHOKE, lose millions of pounds.
I’m going to be forced to step down from all my public offices, become an invisible person on Novus’s board, if not stricken offaltogether. I’m going to be all but exiled from high society, all but disinherited by my parents. A pariah, a social leper, forced to be let into places through the backdoor with a sack over my head.
