The Father
1534 Words
Ethan was still on the phone when I heard his voice change.
Not in volume.
In temperature.
I'd learned the difference over the past week — the boardroom voice, the Marcus voice, the voice he used with me at 6am when his guard was still half asleep. This was none of those.
This was colder than all of them.
I set Jane Eyre face down on the sofa and listened without pretending I wasn't.
"That's not a conversation I'm having over the phone." A pause. "No." Another pause, longer, during which I could hear the thin insistent sound of his father's voice from the speaker without being able to make out the words. "Fine."
He hung up.
Came out of the study.
Looked at me across the room with an expression that told me everything before he said a word.
"He's coming here," I said.
"In an hour."
I stood up.
"Okay," I said, because panic was not useful and an hour was enough time if I moved immediately. "Okay. I need to change. I need to—"
"Aria."
"I need to look like someone you'd actually marry, Ethan, give me a moment—"
"Aria." He crossed the room in four strides and stopped in front of me and put both hands on my shoulders lightly, steadying, and I stopped talking because his hands were on my shoulders and my brain made an executive decision to prioritise that information above everything else. "Breathe."
I breathed.
"You already look like someone I'd marry," he said quietly.
I stared at him.
"You're in a hoodie," I said.
"I know."
"And pyjama bottoms."
"I'm aware."
"Ethan—"
"Go and change," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved in that way I'd been collecting. "But you don't need to panic. You've already handled Vivienne. My father is significantly less frightening than Vivienne."
"Your father is a man who arranges marriages and has a former business partner who disappeared after an arson investigation and is apparently now flying drones outside our window."
A pause.
"Fair point," he said. "Go and change."
I went and changed.
I chose the dark burgundy dress because it said I belong here without trying too hard and I did my hair properly for the first time in days and I stood in front of the mirror and gave myself exactly thirty seconds of honest fear before I put it somewhere useful and walked back out.
Ethan was in the kitchen.
He'd changed too — charcoal suit, white shirt, no tie, the slightly formal version of himself that he wore when things mattered. He looked up when I came in and something moved through his eyes quickly, a sweep of something he didn't say.
"Better?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. Simply. Like the word was doing more work than it appeared to be.
He handed me a coffee.
Our fingers touched on the mug.
Neither of us commented on it.
We stood at the kitchen island in the quiet morning and drank our coffees and didn't speak and it was the kind of not-speaking that had its own texture now, its own specific weight, like a language we'd developed without deciding to.
"What's he like?" I asked finally.
Ethan considered this with the seriousness he brought to questions that deserved it.
"Precise," he said. "He notices everything and comments on very little. He'll watch you more than he speaks to you." A pause. "Don't volunteer information. Answer what he asks and nothing more."
"And if he asks how we met?"
"The gallery. Six months ago. You were looking at a Hockney. I asked your opinion."
"What did I say?"
He looked at me.
"That it was technically impressive and emotionally hollow," he said. "And that anyone who spent that much on something emotionally hollow deserved to feel cheated."
I stared at him. "Did I actually say that?"
"No." The corner of his mouth. "But you would have."
I almost smiled.
He almost smiled back.
The lift chimed.
We both turned.
---
Edward Kingston was exactly what the word patriarch was invented for.
Tall, silver haired, the kind of man who had been powerful for so long that it had stopped being something he did and become simply something he was. He wore a dark coat and carried nothing and moved through the penthouse the way Ethan did — like he'd already measured the room from the doorway and found it satisfactory.
He stopped when he saw me.
Not rudely. Not obviously.
Just — stopped. A half second assessment, complete and efficient, the kind that takes in everything and gives nothing back.
Then he looked at Ethan.
Something passed between them that I didn't have the context for.
"Father," Ethan said.
"Ethan." He moved further into the room. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"You called twenty minutes ago to say you were coming. Interrupting implies more notice than that."
Edward Kingston almost smiled. It looked exactly like Ethan's almost-smiles, which explained a great deal about their origin.
He turned to me.
Extended his hand.
"Miss Bennett," he said. "Aria. Ethan has told me very little about you, which tells me quite a lot."
I shook his hand.
His grip was firm and his eyes were sharp and they were the same dark colour as his son's, which was disorienting.
"He tells me very little about most things," I said. "I've learned to read the silences."
Something shifted in Edward Kingston's expression.
He looked at me for a moment longer than was strictly conversational.
Then he looked at Ethan.
"I see," he said, in a tone that suggested he actually did.
---
We sat in the living room — Edward in the chair Ethan usually claimed, Ethan beside me on the sofa, close enough that our arms were almost touching, a proximity that felt both deliberate and natural in a way I was trying not to examine too closely.
Edward asked questions.
Precise ones, as advertised.
How did we meet. How long. What did I do for work. Where was I from originally. Did I have family in London.
I answered carefully, following Ethan's instructions — enough truth to be credible, enough detail to be convincing, the gallery story delivered smoothly because I'd been turning it over in my mind since he told it to me and it had started to feel almost real.
Ethan's hand found mine at some point during the third question.
Not dramatically. Not for show.
Just his hand settling over mine on the sofa cushion between us, fingers lacing together, warm and certain, like it was something he did every day.
My pulse did something I chose not to acknowledge.
Edward noticed. Of course he noticed.
He said nothing. But the quality of his attention shifted slightly, the way a camera shifts when something comes into focus.
"You're not what I expected," he said to me, eventually.
"What did you expect?" I asked.
He considered this.
"Someone more careful," he said. "Ethan tends to — inspire caution in people." He glanced at his son. "You don't seem particularly cautious."
"I spilled coffee on him the first time we met," I said. "The window for caution closed fairly early."
Edward Kingston looked at me for a long moment.
Then he did something I hadn't seen him do since he arrived.
He laughed.
Properly. Briefly. But real.
Ethan's hand tightened on mine — the smallest possible pressure, there and gone — and I understood it without needing to translate it.
*Well done.*
---
Edward left forty minutes later.
We stood side by side at the lift and watched the doors close and then stood in the silence of the penthouse in the aftermath of something that had gone, against all reasonable expectation, well.
"He liked you," Ethan said.
"He tolerated me efficiently," I said. "For your father I suspect that's the same thing."
Ethan looked at me.
"It is," he said.
His hand was still holding mine.
We both looked down at the same moment.
Neither of us had noticed we were still holding on after Edward left.
We should have let go.
We didn't.
"Aria—"
My phone buzzed.
I grabbed it with my free hand.
Marcus.
I answered immediately.
"We found something," Marcus said, and his voice had the particular flatness of a man delivering news he wished he wasn't. "In the hotel room. Hidden. It took time to find because it wasn't meant to be found." A pause. "It's a file. Documents, photographs, correspondence going back three years." Another pause. "Aria — it's about you."
The floor felt very far away suddenly.
"Me?" I said.
"You were targeted before you ever met Ethan," Marcus said quietly. "This wasn't random. Whoever is behind this — they chose you specifically." He paused one final time. "And we found a name. The person who gave them yours."
The silence stretched.
"Marcus," Ethan said, very quietly, very carefully. "Whose name?"
Marcus told us.
I heard Ethan's sharp intake of breath beside me.
Then I heard my own.
Because the name Marcus said was one I knew.
One I trusted.
One I never, in a thousand years, would have suspected.
- Writer
