I’ve lived my life avoiding mistakes, being the best, but they keep seeming to creep in. I’ve lived with the guilt like a ghost that refused to haunt me properly. Always hoveringjust out of reach, impossible to exorcise and just as impossible to ignore.
I have to fix this.
I spend the next hours locked in my office. It’s not hard, once I start, to pull up the relevant documentation. Ben Wilde mismanaged Mather & Wilde, and I have access to all the financial documentation. My private investigator sends over everything we have on when he hired professionals to intimidate my sister.
Piece by piece, I build a case.
He’s a Chihuahua going after a Doberman, and it’s time I remind him of that. Paige is mine. Not his. And he doesn’t get to mess with her ever again.
Late that night, I make the call.
He doesn’t pick up right away. I didn’t expect him to. But I told his lawyers to expect a call from me, and eventually he comes on the line.
“Raphaël,” he says, and there’s smugness in his voice that makes me want to do dangerous, reckless things. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
“Touching. I didn’t know you spent so much time thinking about me.”
There’s a beat of silence. “Look, I did what I had to do. You know that. I know you can respect that.”
He’s almost twice my age. The second son, and he lost his older brother. Just like me. Inherited a heritage brand. Just like me.
“Your niece is your only living relation, and yet you’re trying to hurt her instead of making peace. Tell me why that doesn’t make you the scum of the fucking earth.”
There’s an intake of breath on the other end of the line.
I tap my fingers against my desk, and I’m furious at myself for knowing just what this man is capable of—from last year, from what he did to my sister—and still letting him do this to Paige.
“She was never meant to run the company. Not yet,” Ben says. “The legacy… it’s too important. It’s the only thing we have left. She knows that, deep down. And yet she still merged with you. That shows poor judgment.”
“And you deciding to run it into the ground rather than sell it to me doesn’t?”
“That’s different,” he says hotly. “You’re the enemy. You always have been, and sheforgotthat.”
“The company was dying under your watch. In what world should she have sat back and let that happen?”
“It wasn’t dying,” he says fiercely. “Yes, I made some bad decisions, but I was fixing them. Until you and your dad came along, buying up all those shares, forcing Paige into a terrible position. I would have helped her out of it. And then she turned to you. You’re the devil in all of this.”
“You’re protecting your ego,” I say. “Not the company. We both know that. Don’t insult me by pretending otherwise.”
“Ego? You’re going to break it down to the studs and dismantle three generations of Wildes’ work. It’s the last thing we have of this family. And don’t you see what you’re doing? The way you’ve exposed things? It’s tarnishing this legacy forever.”
“A legacy,” I say. The word has been bouncing around my mind since the day I was born.
Ben lost his brother, too, in an accident. He, too, became obsessed—with priming, protecting, stewarding and shepherding the remains of his family.
Anger makes my pulse throb. Legacy doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have a family worth protecting.
And suddenly, all I am is so fucking tired.
He sounds like me. Like who I was before I met her.
“You think you protected your family’s legacy,” I say. “But you helped destroy it. You could have been family to her. You could have been a mentor. But now… if you come near her again, I will destroy you.”
“Try me,” he says.
He’s so obsessed with his vanity that he’s willing to give anything, sacrifice anyone, to maintain his own self-image. Somewhere along the winding road of life, Ben Wilde had choices. And he made the wrong ones. He could have had Paige in his life.
Instead he lost her.
