I’m not sure they planned for me.
I take out my phone and glance at the time. It’s ten a.m. and I’m sure the workers for the winery have already arrived. I should probably get out of here, but I need to figure out how to get that footage back.
I google how to recover deleted or damaged footage from a security network DVR and discover to my surprise that all hope isn’t lost yet. It’s possible with software, or a professional can do it.
I look around the room, trying to figure out how to do this. If I take anything—and I’m not sure what to take—that might set off some alarm bells. The best bet I have is to find someone who can do this and bring them here.
Preferably someone who can keep their mouth shut until I know what’s going on.
Someone who can help me, not just in this but in everything.
I need to hire a professional.
CHAPTER FOUR
BLAISE
“What do you want?” I ask as I stand on the front steps of my parents’ château, staring at my brother as he opens the door.
“That’s the greeting I get?” Pascal asks, swirling amber liquid around in a snifter glass. He’s still in a suit even though it’s nine o’clock at night, and it’s a different suit than he was wearing at the office earlier. Both Dumont, of course.
“What’s going on?” I say with a sigh. I was comfortable back at my apartment, watching Netflix, drinking vodka, ignoring the outside world. Then Pascal texted me, saying he needed me to come over to discuss business. Said it had to be done in person, here, where he still lives with our parents—couldn’t be done at work tomorrow.
So that, and the fact that I had to drive an hour outside of the city to get here, already put me on edge. I just want this, whatever the fuck this is, over with.
“You never were one for patience, Blaise,” he says with a smirk. “You always wanted things now, immediate gratification. And when you didn’t get it, you blew up, like a stick of dynamite. You could time it down to the second.”
“Give me a fucking break,” I snarl at him. “Either you tell me why the fuck I drove an hour here for something you couldn’t tell me at work, or I’m leaving.”
He rolls his eyes and lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. I should have known you’d be like this. Come on in.”
He opens the door wide as if I’m a guest, as if I didn’t grow up in this house of horrors right alongside him. Lord knows why the hell he still lives here, but there are a lot of things about Pascal that have never made any sense, things I’d rather ignore and not get to the bottom of.
I step inside and look around. “Where are our parents?”
“Out for dinner in Paris. They won’t be back for a while.”
I raise my brow at him as he takes a calm sip of his cognac. “You’re not planning to murder me, are you?” I ask, half joking. While it’s a relief to be here when my father and mother aren’t here, it’s also a little odd to be alone with Pascal outside of the occasional discussion at work.
“Murder,” he muses. “On so many people’s minds lately.”
I frown. “What?”
“Here, come into the study. I’ll pour you a drink.”
“Just one,” I say, following him into the elaborate library, where my father keeps a large amount of alcohol along with rows of priceless literature. I remember being a kid and wanting to read all the books, but every time I tried, he’d bring out the cane he always kept behind his desk and rap it on top of my hand until I had bruises for days.
Instinctively my hands coil into fists and then relax. I still have some things to work out, some issues I’m sure a therapist would have a field day with. Coming to this house brings them back every time.
I think Pascal knows this and that’s why we’re in here. After he pours me a drink from the bottle, making sure to top off his as a show of trust that it’s not full of poison—as if that’s a real fucking thing normal brothers worry about—he goes around the mahogany desk at the end and brings out the cane.
“Remember this?” Pascal asks, stabbing the air with it. “Remember what he used to do with this?”
“Vaguely,” I reply, sniffing the cognac. So far so good.
“You knew about this, right?” He puts his glass down on the desk, careful to use a coaster, then twists the brass horse head of the cane around and around until it comes loose and pulls it out. The head is attached to a long, skinny sword.
“All this time I wondered why our father had this cane since he never limped, never had any ailment,” Pascal says, holding the sword up to the light. “Turns out he just liked having a weapon. I suppose we’re lucky he didn’t use this end on us.”
This catches me off guard for a moment. Us. All this time I assumed whatever violence my father showed toward me wasn’t directed at Pascal. Pascal was the golden boy.
“Is that why I’m here? To discuss Father and his weapons?”
“Not exactly,” he says, sliding the sword back inside the cane with one fluid motion. “He doesn’t know you’re here, and I’d like to keep it between us.”
Okay. This has my interest.
Still, my brother is as trustworthy as a snake. I have to be cautious.
“So then why am I here?”
He sits down behind the desk and leans back in the leather chair, looking both like he does it all the time and also like a child imitating his father. “I need a favor from you.”
I raise my brows. This is a new one. “What favor?”
He licks his lips slowly before they twist up into a crooked smile. “I need you to keep an eye on Seraphine.”
The sound of her name jars me, making me blink. “Seraphine? Why?”
I mean, what the fuck now? Just last week my father called me into his office and expressed concern over my cousin’s role in the business. He says he fears that the death of her father is too much for her and she’s drowning in her responsibilities.
If I’m being honest here, I think Seraphine is handling everything exceptionally well. She’s a hothead, so she’s often fighting against my father and Pascal, especially since they want to change the company in so many ways. I don’t blame her for the pushback—she’s sticking up for her father’s legacy that way. But I also know that we’re making more money now and with it, the perks. I know I’ve been given the opportunity to completely take over the health and beauty department if that’s what I want. But it will mean Seraphine will have to quit or get fired in the process.
“We can’t have an outlier on our team, and that’s what she is,” my father had said. “This company is ours now. We need to be a united front. We need to sweep away the past. My brother had a good heart but bad business sense. This is the dawning of a new age for us, for our legacy, for our name, for the brand.”
The irony is that I think I’m more of an outlier than Seraphine is. My father and brother just don’t know that yet.
“I have concerns,” Pascal eventually says, taking a deliberate sip of his drink.
“Father already talked to me about her. He said she’s slipping. I’m supposed to guide her. I’m guessing he wants me to replace her.”