All Chapters of Chasing the Pride of Alessi : Chapter 41 - Chapter 45

The pen was heavier than it looked. I held it over the line under Alfred's name and signed.My hand shook less than I expected. I had braced for something enormous. What I felt was closer to finishing a form at the DMV. Necessary, and a little anticlimactic. Mostly I felt tired, down to the bone."Grandpa." My voice cracked on it, and I squeezed his hand.Alfred looked at my signature, then at me."The Vane name has survived worse than a divorce. I have spent sixty years protecting it. I won't sacrifice you and that child to keep it tidy. If this family can't survive being on the wrong side of this, it wasn't worth much to begin with."My throat tightened. I had been waiting for someone to tell me what I owed. He had put the entire weight of the name on one side and chosen me.I pressed my lips together and nodded.He closed the folder. "Griggs."A man by the door stepped forward."Take this to my grandson's desk at the tower. Put it in his hand yourself. If he's in a meeting, wait ou

|•Marin• |I had argued with Damien outside the hospital, first about a hotel, then about my mother's house, and I lost both once I worked out what each one meant. A hotel meant a desk clerk, a name in a register, and a photographer who would know my face by midnight. My mother's house meant my mother, who would take one look at me and understand everything, and cry, and I had no strength left to watch that tonight."The pavilion has a gate," he'd said back in the hospital room, while Alfred stood by the bed gathering his cane. "I keep a list of who's allowed through it. Tonight you'd be the only name on it."Alfred kept his eyes on his cane while Damien spoke. Then he looked at me and said, "Good." To Damien he said, "Drive carefully, and call Roland yourself if anything changes before morning." He asked nothing about a married woman spending the night in another man's house. That afternoon he had signed the papers ending that marriage, and he saw no reason to mind what came after.S

|•Marin• |The brass plate beside my door said MARIN ALESSI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, BRAND STRATEGY. I had asked for Alessi. The plate was already up when I arrived.The title matched the one I had held in the Vane tower. The department didn't. It had its own staff and its own say over the work, and nobody in it took orders from the executive floor.The building was the one Alfred called the Sibling Branch. It stood on the east side of the city, a narrow tower of glass with nine floors, a forty-minute drive from the sixty floors of the Vane Enterprises tower. Vane Enterprises owned it, and the group's name was on the deed. The family had set it up to run on its own, and it answered to the group for two things only, money and law. Its work was luxury. It designed the look and voice of high-end brands and hosted the foreign investors whose dinners and tours decide whether a fund trusts a company and signs.Weston had never worked a day on those nine floors. That was why I had asked Alfred f