LOGINShare
Chapter 75: Reclaiming
publish date:
2026-04-16 22:22:35
Latest chapter
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 76: Natasha's Question
Natasha calls on Saturday morning while I'm in the shower and leaves a voice message that says, "Come to the studio, I need an extra pair of hands and also I want to talk to you about something... those are separate needs, bring coffee."I play it twice and smile at my own phone and text her: One hour.Vincent is reading on the couch when I come out dressed and he looks up and something in his face is easier than it's been all week, open and unhurried. "Natasha?" he asks."Studio," I say. "Few hours.""Good," he says, and means it, and that means something to me.Natasha's studio smells like fresh dye today, something sharp and bright over the usual linseed undertone, and there are two new bolts of fabric across the worktable in a deep rust color that she is pinning at intervals with a focus so complete she doesn't look up when I come in."Put the coffees down and hold that end," she says.I put the coffees down and hold the end of the fabric while she pins the other side and we work
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 75: Reclaiming
The Allard lawyers make contact on Friday morning.A letter, formal and dense, delivered to Professor Moreau's department address since that is the institutional affiliation I listed on the Commission notification. Moreau scans it and emails it to me with a single line: Expected. Don't respond without me. Come Monday.I read it twice and feel the shape of it... careful legal language designed to make my documentation sound like overreach, my methodology sound like inexperience, and my Commission filing sound like a premature action taken without sufficient professional standing. It is well-written. It is also, Moreau's one line tells me, expected, which means it is a standard opening move rather than a killing blow.I close the email and put my phone face down on the kitchen counter and stand there in the Friday afternoon quiet and let myself feel the weight of it for exactly five minutes... the low specific anxiety of being nineteen and having a seventy-three-year-old man's lawyers w
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 74: The Fight
I tell Vincent about the Allard meeting over dinner and he listens with his full attention the way he always does and says the right things... that I handled it correctly, that Allard's professional consequences comment is bluster, that the Commission process will run its course.He doesn't ask about Mikhail.I don't mention Mikhail.We do the dishes together and he tells me something funny about his Amsterdam broker and I laugh and it's warm and normal and underneath it the unfinished thing from three nights ago sits in the room like furniture we keep walking around.In bed he reaches for me and I go to him easily, his mouth on mine, his hands warm and certain, and we move together in the familiar close way and it's good, it's genuinely good, his forehead against mine and his voice low in my ear saying things that undo me, and when it's over, I lie with my head on his chest and listen to his heart slow down and think about the text on my phone that says you did well."Mikhail helped
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 73: Bernard Allard
He is shorter than his voice suggested.That's the first thing I notice when Bernard Allard walks into the hotel lobby on Thursday morning, the Lutetia, naturally, because men like Bernard Allard do not meet inconvenient young women in neutral locations.He chooses the ground. He is maybe five foot eight, silver-haired, beautifully dressed in the way of men who have been wearing good clothes so long they've stopped thinking about it. He has a warm handshake and direct eye contact and a smile that reaches his eyes completely, and if I didn't have twelve pages of documentation in the bag on my shoulder, I might find him entirely charming."Mademoiselle Chen," he says, in French, then switching to English when he clocks me, smooth and immediate. "Thank you for making time.""Of course," I reply.He steers me toward a seating area at the back of the lobby, quiet and upholstered and selected for privacy, and a waiter materializes before we've fully sat down. Allard orders tea without consu
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 72: What Vincent Notices
He doesn't ask where I've been.That's the thing about Vincent. He gives me space as a feature not a flaw, this deliberate, principled looseness of hold, and usually I love it and tonight when I come through the door at seven with cold-coffee thoughts and Mikhail Volkov's pale eyes still somewhere in my peripheral awareness, the space he gives me feels like something I have to walk across before I reach him.I kiss him hello and he kisses me back, warm and present, and his hand cups my face briefly in the way he does, like checking I'm real, and then he goes back to the stove and I sit at the kitchen counter and watch him cook and try to locate myself in the room."Natasha's installation is coming," I say."Good," he replies."I walked back through Belleville," I say. Which is true."Mm," he says.He doesn't ask anything else and I don't offer anything else and we eat dinner and talk about other things, his Amsterdam broker, my Sorbonne seminar on Thursday, whether the restaurant on R
FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY Chapter 71: Coffee With Mikhail
He walks slowly, which I didn't expect from him. Vincent moves with purpose, always somewhere to be, always the next thing. Mikhail walks like he has decided the street is exactly where he wants to be and the rest of the world can organize itself around that.I tell him about the Allard situation. Not all of it, not the Marco complexity, but the shape of it, the Weis inventory, the restitution claim, the voicemail with its careful language about reaching an understanding.He listens without interrupting, the coffee warm in my hand, Belleville moving around us in its afternoon way, the market stalls and the noise and the particular light of a Paris afternoon that can't decide if it wants to be winter or spring.When I finish, he is quiet for half a block."He'll try to reframe the documentation," he says. "Position it as a legitimate wartime acquisition through some intermediary that no longer exists and can't be questioned. It's the standard approach for collections with this kind of
You may also like
Mafia Lord's Innocent Bride
Rabia Sajal Niazi106.5K viewsThe Shark Mafia Boss
Peyton Iuga296.6K viewsItalian Men
Sunshine109.5K viewsINSANE FOR YOU
Taevya184.3K viewsThe Pretty Prince and the Beast King
PUREBLISS484 viewsThe Beauty and Her Dangerous Mafia Lord
Prunella Eunice297 viewsHis revenge obsession
Ivyaguas 97 viewsBound To My Mafia Stepuncle
Fadira Husayn 467 views
