Ruthless Rival (Cruel Castaways 1)

“The financial implications are another thing to take into consideration.” Mom’s voice drifted from the phone I was holding. “The company will head straight to bankruptcy if Conrad doesn’t step down, and even if he does, it might be too late. Not to mention they’re suing him for most of his net worth. I can’t believe he did this to us.”

“Let me sleep on this, Mom.”

“Okay. Oh . . . and Arya?” My mother sniffed on the other end. I stilled, waiting for her next words. “Don’t be a stranger. You can call me, too, you know. I’m still your mother.”

Hardly, I thought.

You were never my anything at all.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ARYA

Present

I decided to take a day off to decompress. And by decompress I meant totally compress. I wanted to get some answers and dig into the claims against my father. Before yesterday, I’d cautiously assumed Dad was speaking the truth when he gave me a blanket denial. Now, I wasn’t sure. Last night, I’d texted Louie, who’d confirmed they’d received additional discovery requests. Other women were joining the lawsuit, and the sum on the recently filed statement of damages was astronomical; it would strip my father of most of his assets if he lost.

I thought about Christian the whole subway journey from my apartment to my parents’ Park Avenue penthouse. I absolutely loathed that he was right about me taking a step back.

When I got to my parents’ apartment, my mother waited at the door.

“Thank you for coming. I was thinking maybe we could order sushi for lunch or something?” A hopeful smile tugged at her lips.

“Hmm, what?” I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a prank. She’d never offered to do anything with me. And upon getting rejected a few times during my preteen years, I’d stopped trying.

“Sushi. You. Me. I can help you dig through Dad’s stuff.”

Going all Brady Bunch with my mom wasn’t in my plans right now, but I acknowledged that she did make an effort. I patted her arm, brushing past her toward the master bedroom. “Sorry. I work best when I’m alone.”

I reached the master bedroom’s door, using the secret knock only Dad and I had. One rap, beat, five raps, beat, two raps.

“Dad?”

There was no answer. Mom appeared beside me, twisting the hem of her dress. “You know, he’s been moody all day. He wouldn’t even take his lawyers’ calls.”

“Dad!” I knocked again, ditching the secret knock. “Open the door. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me. I need to understand what happened.”

I couldn’t sleep a wink during the night. To think that my father could be capable of such things made me want to hurl myself into the Hudson River.

Mom huddled nearby, serving as a curious audience.

“Go away,” Dad called out through the door.

“Dad, I want to help.”

“You do? Because you haven’t been too helpful so far.”

“I have questions,” I bit out. My growing suspicions and his attitude were a bad combination.

“If you don’t believe me, maybe you shouldn’t come to court.”

“No one said I don’t believe you.” Although admittedly, my confidence in his innocence was very wobbly. “I just want—”

“I’m not going to answer any of your questions. Leave!” he roared.

I took a step back instinctively, feeling my cheeks go hot, like he’d slapped me. My father hadn’t once yelled at me before. That didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed him being aggressive to others. If I was honest with myself—which I wasn’t, most of the time, when it came to him—he’d had anger-management issues for as long as I could remember. But of course, anger was cancer. It touched everything in your life. The way you behaved inside the office always bled into your homelife. Your love life. Your life-life.

I turned to my mother. “Do you have the key to his file cabinets? I would like to go through his employment contracts.”

Dad was an old-school businessman. He believed everything needed to be printed out and stored for safekeeping. Any correspondence he’d had with an employee would be filed in his study. He was too cautious to keep these things at work.

My mother wrung her hands. “Do you think it can help?”

“Worth a shot.” Even if it wouldn’t help his case, it was going to help me understand if there was merit to any of the allegations.

Ten minutes later, I sat on the lush carpet of my father’s study, thirty years’ worth of documentation in front of me. Everything was there. From service agreements to personal emails and termination letters. I wondered how much of these he’d handed over to Louie and Terrance. I wondered if he’d handed them anything at all. He seemed caged up where this trial was concerned. A part of me wanted to call Christian and try and gauge what exactly they had on him. But as Christian had mentioned—his chief objective was to bang me, not help me.