THE ASHGRAVE INHERITANCE

Nico's Fury

He didn't go home until past midnight, and even then only because Bea called twice and texted a third time, the last message just his name and three question marks, which was as close as his sister came to actually demanding something.

He sat in his father's old office instead his own office now, technically, had been for six months, though he still thought of the room by its previous owner more often than he'd admit to anyone and read the charter documents a second time, and then a third, in the particular chair his father had died in eventually, in a house Nico had stopped visiting the moment the funeral ended.

The room still smelled faintly of the cedar humidor his father had kept stocked for visitors Nico had never once actually seen him offer a cigar to — status, not habit, the way most things in this office had been status rather than habit. He'd meant to have it cleared out months ago. He hadn't gotten around to it, and tonight, sitting where his father used to sit, he found he was glad of that in a way he didn't examine too closely.

A restriction on the disposition of controlling shares, triggered upon any transfer to a party outside the founding families, permitting the minority shareholder of record first right of purchase at a fixed valuation.

He'd read corporate charters for a living for a decade. He had never, not once, seen a clause written with this much specificity aimed at a scenario this particular — a scenario that, as far as he'd ever known, had never once come close to happening until six days ago, when his dead father's lawyer had read a woman's name into a room and detonated it.

His counsel's theory, delivered that afternoon in a conference room two floors below this one, came with the particular carefulness of a man billing four figures an hour specifically to avoid being the one who said something wrong. "Boilerplate," he'd said, tapping the page as though tapping it might make the word truer. "Decades old. Companies this size accumulate a hundred clauses like this over the years — most of them never triggered, most of them forgotten the moment the ink dries."

"And this one?" Nico had asked.

The lawyer hadn't answered that directly, which Nico had noticed, and had decided, riding the elevator back up alone afterward, not to let go of.

It was a reasonable theory, as theories went. Nico did not believe a word of it. His father had not forgotten anything in his life that mattered, and a clause capable of costing the family company its controlling interest was not the kind of thing a man like Thomas Ashgrave simply misplaced for thirty years.

Which meant someone had wanted it there. Which meant someone, thirty years ago, had wanted exactly this scenario to be possible a scenario nobody currently living at this company, himself included, had been told the first thing about.

He turned an old fountain pen over in his hand while he thought it through his father's, kept in the same desk drawer for as long as Nico could remember, never once refilled because his father had switched to signing everything digitally a decade before he died and had simply never thrown the pen away. It was a small, useless thing to be turning over at midnight in an empty office. He did it anyway, because his hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching for his phone to call a dead man who couldn't answer.

He didn't like being caught unprepared. He particularly didn't like being caught unprepared by a dead man who'd had six months of terminal illness in which to explain himself and had chosen, instead, silence and a sealed envelope as though thirty years of careful control ended, for Thomas Ashgrave, exactly where the truth would have cost him something to say out loud while he was still around to answer for it.

Bea let herself into the office without knocking, which she'd been doing since she was nine years old and had apparently decided, correctly, that knocking had never once stopped him from being annoyed at her anyway.

"You look like you're plotting something," she said, dropping into the chair across from his desk, sneakers up on the edge of it in a way their father would have hated and that Nico, most nights, let go without comment. Tonight he let it go without comment too. He didn't have the energy for the sneakers.

"I'm reading."

"You're brooding at legal documents. There's a difference, and you're not fooling anyone who's known you since before you could talk." She studied him a moment, the studio paint still faintly visible under one thumbnail from whatever she'd been working on before she'd apparently decided his crisis outranked it. "I talked to her, by the way. After the reading. Sera."

Something in him went very still. "You did what."

"I said I didn't know either, and that you wouldn't have let it happen if you'd had a say." Bea shrugged, entirely unbothered by whatever expression he was currently making at her. "Which is true, isn't it? You'd have fought Dad on this for a year if he'd told you while he was alive. So I said it. I'm not going to apologize for being decent to a woman our father blindsided the same afternoon he blindsided you."

"She could be the one who benefits most from all of this."

"She could also just be someone who buried her own father nine months ago and got a phone call out of nowhere telling her she's suddenly entangled with ours. Both things can be true, Nico. You're allowed to be furious at Dad without deciding she's the villain in it just because she's the only person left standing close enough to be angry at."

"You've gotten good at that," he said. "Deciding who deserves decency before you know anything about them."

"I've gotten good at it because somebody in this family has to be, and it was never going to be you or Dad." She said it lightly, the way she said most things that actually mattered, as if weight would make it too heavy to hand across the table. "Mom used to say that about you, actually. That you'd rather be right and alone than wrong and forgiven."

He didn't want to talk about their mother tonight. Bea, reading that the way she read most things about him without needing to be told, let the subject drop as easily as she'd raised it a mercy he recognized and didn't thank her for out loud. He didn't answer the rest of it either, because there wasn't a version of an answer that didn't sound, even to him, like an excuse for exactly what she was describing. He was angry — had been angry since the moment Ferris broke the seal on that second document — and anger wanted somewhere to go, and it was considerably easier to aim it at the woman across the table than at a father six months in the ground who couldn't be made to explain himself no matter how long Nico sat in his chair waiting for it.

"I asked legal to find a way out of the marriage clause," he said finally. "Contest the codicil. Argue incapacity, undue influence, anything that gets the shares back to a straightforward transfer without dragging a stranger into a marriage neither of us asked for."

Bea's eyebrows went up. "And?"

"And there's apparently a second problem I haven't fully understood yet, which somebody is coming to explain to me in person tomorrow morning, because — and I'm quoting our general counsel directly — it isn't the kind of thing that should go over the phone."

His phone buzzed on the desk between them before Bea could answer that. A message from his head of legal, seven words long, sent at eleven forty at night, which told him on its own that whatever was coming wasn't good news dressed up to look manageable.

We need to talk about the buyout clause.

He read it twice. He did not, yet, understand what it meant. He understood, with the specific cold clarity that had gotten him through every genuine crisis of his professional life, that whatever it turned out to mean, refusing this marriage was about to become a great deal more complicated than simply deciding he didn't want it.

He set the pen back in its drawer and closed it, and sat for another minute in the dark long after Bea had let herself out, the tower's lights guttering on and off in other windows across the skyline like a code he didn't have the key to yet. Whatever his father had built into that charter, he'd built it on purpose, and built it to survive him. Nico intended to understand why before he let anyone lawyers, board, a woman he'd known for exactly six days — decide what happened next.