Steam curled off the plates. Silver clinked against porcelain. Robert had his fork buried in everything on the table, one dish after another, like a man trying to eat his way through an entire kitchen.
The pancakes. The soufflé. The steak most of all.
He shoved a thick cut of it into his mouth and chewed loud enough to hear across the room.
"Mhm, this is good. Really good."
Robert loved steak. Everyone at the table knew it, even the staff who’d never met him before today.
"Thank you, sire."
"No, no. I’m serious Jeff. Something’s happened to your cooking since the last time we met." Robert confessed. "You should work with me if Nico doesn’t pay you well."
"I must kindly decline, sire." Jeff said it with a small smile. "Afterall, it’s all thanks to the late master Silas and master Nico here that I was able to improve at all."
"Haha, of course." Robert laughed impressively. "Your cooking skills may have changed, but your humility remains the same, Jeff."
Across the table, Nico said nothing. His jaw was tight, his fingers wrapped around his cutlery like he meant to break it rather than use it. He hadn’t touched a bite. He wasn’t going to touch his father’s presence either.
The moment word reached him that Robert was in the building, he’d run upstairs to change. Then he’d sent two of his men to lock his wives in their room until the man was gone.
Ten minutes into this father-son performance of a dinner, he was already hating himself for it. For the lock. For the girls sitting upstairs like something to be hidden away.
They weren’t his slaves. They weren’t anyone’s. But Robert was dangerous, and everyone who knew his name knew why they called him the monarch of darkness. He left a stain wherever he walked, on whatever he touched.
Part of that was the bloodline power running in him. The rest was just Robert being Robert.
And getting here hadn’t been easy for the man, either. A three-hour flight. A long, bumpy drive through a town that clearly offended his sensibilities. A journey that had started with him peeling himself off his favorite couch.
Robert hadn’t crossed an ocean of inconvenience just to ask if his son was doing well.
"Leave us, Jeff."
Nico said it flatly, and the cook slipped away toward the kitchen without a word. Even with Jeff gone, Robert didn’t speak first. He let the silence stretch until Nico broke it.
"Why are you here, actually?"
"Now, Nico. Is that how you greet your father after so many years?"
"Answer my question, father." Nico slammed his fork on the table. "This is about the inheritance, isn’t it."
Robert stopped eating. He looked up, set his cutlery down with a small, deliberate click, then reached for a napkin from the clean pile. He wiped his mouth, crumpled it, and tossed it aside like it had personally offended him.
"At least you know why I’m here. That saves us a bit of reunion time." Robert said it nonchantly, grabbing his wine glass. "So, let’s get to business, shall we?"
"What business?"
"The agenda of whom Silas’s inheritance goes to." Robert replied. "I already have a top pick."
Nico sighed, long and tired, the kind of sigh that had been building since before his father walked through the door.
"Look father, I want to believe this is happening because I didn’t make things clear the first time. So, I would now."
He paused. Looked his father dead in the eyes.
"I am not giving away Silas’s inheritance."
Robert smiled, and there was nothing warm in it.
"I don’t think you have a choice, son."
"Okay, one, don’t ever call me that. And two, I’m sure I have a say in this. Afterall, you did come all the way here for my approval, didn’t you?"
"I heard the business’s been rundown lately. Few trusting buyers. Just as few contracts since Silas died. Did you really think this whole thing came crashing due to economy?"
Robert asked, then continued:
"If I were you, I would ask myself. What exactly doesn’t fit? The loss of a leader, or my abominable existence?"
"Let me guess. Is this the part where you start to chatter about my powerlessness? Blah blah this, blah blah that."
"Power is honor to the Ashford family, especially when it comes to business!" Robert said it with a slam on the table. "You wouldn’t understand what our uniqueness influences, since you weren’t born with it."
"If you came all the way here to convince me, then you just failed with that very last sentence." Nico stood up and was starting to walk away. "Come father, I’ll escort you to your car."
Robert didn’t move. He didn’t wait for Nico to reach the door, either. His voice landed before Nico’s hand touched the handle.
"I invoke a Reckoning."
Nico froze mid-step. Slowly, he turned back around.
He’d known this was coming. Some part of him had been waiting for it since the man walked in wearing that smile. And as always, there would be no fighting it, no clever way out.
The Reckoning was old law, older than either of them. A settlement between claimants of a mafia house, where each side was made to lay the bodies of their rivals at the feet of the truth to decide who deserved to inherit.
Robert was the last true elder the Ashford family had left. The boss above all bosses. His word carried the weight of law itself, unless every claimant refused him at once, which had never once happened in the family’s history.
(And trust me bro, there’d been a lot invocations in the past years)
In plainer terms, Robert wanted this inheritance badly enough that he was willing to sign his own son’s death warrant to get it.
"Fine. Let’s settle this that way."
Nico replied coldly, no hesitation in his voice at all.
Robert’s eyebrows drew together, just slightly. He’d expected begging, maybe. A boy on his knees, clawing for his own life. Instead he got silence and a straight spine, and it clearly wasn’t the answer he came for.
He rose from his chair and crossed the room, stopping in front of Nico the exact way he used to when Nico was small enough to flinch at it. This time, there was no flinch. Nico didn’t so much as blink.
"You have a month to finish this." Robert said. "I’d be careful if I were you. Your competition apparently seems really interested in this also. He’s the mad one."
The mad one could only mean Damon. Third son of the Ashford line, and the sibling who’d made a hobby out of tormenting Nico long before any of this inheritance business began.
Damon wasn’t just violent. He hunted for it. Where Stefan settled things with his fists because he had to, Damon went looking for reasons to use his.
Looking at his father’s face now, calm and satisfied, Nico understood. This hadn’t been decided today. It had been planned long before Robert ever booked that flight. He’d only come to make it official.
Fucking assholes.
"Say hi to your wives for me, Nico." Robert said it the second he stepped through the door. "I heard they are pretty at this time of the year."