Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
“Well, you won’t have a part of it then, but there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Do this, and I’ll never work at Cade Energy.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m not threatening you, Dad. I’m saying if you go forward with this pipeline, there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever work with you.”
He stiffens, his eyes slits of reptilian green.
“We didn’t need you to build this company, and we won’t need you to keep it. I’ll be damned if you’ll manipulate me into anything. You wouldn’t know how to run a business if your life depended on it. That’s the problem, you ungrateful welp. You’ve had the Cade name all your life. You don’t have what it takes to make it without it.”
“Oh, like Owen became a senator without using the Cade name? Give me a fucking break. He’s your puppet. Your hand is so far up his ass, you have to wipe for him.”
“You’re jealous of your brother’s success. That’s pathetic, since you won’t do what it takes to succeed yourself.”
“I am doing what it takes to succeed. I have been. You just haven’t cared because it’s not your plan.”
“You don’t have a plan, boy,” my father sneers. “What plan is that? Saving whales and Indians? Walk away from me, and we’ll have something the Cade family has never had before.” He fills his pause with deliberate cruelty. “A failure.”
I let his words hurt. I let myself feel the full weight of his contempt and his disappointment. His eyes gleam darkly like volcanic glass. Even in defeat he looks simultaneously frigid and like he might drown you in hot lava at any second.
“I won’t fail.” My words carry no bravado, only confidence, because I have every intention of proving him wrong.
“You will,” he counters with as much certainty. “You are unsalvageable.”
Unsalvageable.
I should have known he’d find a word that went beyond disowned. Beyond disgraced. A word that would cut to my core character as if it was something he’d tried to save and failed miserably. And now there’s no hope.
The car comes to a stop. Our fight has frosted the air. Tension coats the interior of the car. I’m surprised the windows haven’t fogged.
We both exit our respective sides. The Cade jet idles on the tarmac, awaiting my father’s bidding like every other subject in his kingdom.
He starts walking, stopping to turn when he realizes I’m not with him.
“Come on,” he snaps. “I have more important things to do than indulge your temper tantrum.”
“You have never paid one tuition bill,” I say, not addressing his insulting words. “Never paid my rent or room and board. And you haven’t even noticed.”
The look on his face should bring me some satisfaction, but it only reiterates how little he cares about me as a person; he hasn’t seriously concerned himself with the details of my life because I’m not where he wants me to be.
“Grams left me a little money that I received when I turned eighteen, if you remember,” I say with a painful, wry smile. “Not much by your standards, but it lasts if you’re careful. I’ve been on my own for years and doing better than fine.”
“You wouldn’t last a year without my name.” His thin smile relishes the probability of my failure.
“You know what? I might fail. I might end up broke, but I’ll be my own man. It’ll be hard, but I’m determined to make a life for myself that has nothing to do with the Cade name.”
And then I see it on his face, in his eyes. This is the moment that breaks us. It comes as suddenly as the gargantuan icebergs I’ve been studying. One moment, whole and solid, and the next, severed into two distinct walls of ice estranged from each other. That’s what we are. Separate. Frozen.
“Say what you really mean, Maxim. It’s not just the name or the company you want nothing to do with, is it?”
“I want nothing to do with you. You’re not cutting me off, Dad,” I tell him, slinging the words like stones catapulted over a wall. “I’m the one cutting you off.”
I have no idea where we are. The airfield is in the middle of nowhere, but I turn away from my father and his private planes and corrupt kingdom and start on a path I can’t even see in front of me. I don’t exactly know how I’ll do it, but I’ll prove him wrong, and all while leading a life free of him and his expectations and his constant disapproval.
I walk away, and I don’t look back.
CHAPTER 4
LENNIX
Defeat and dust mingle in the clear morning air. We gather on a cliff overlooking the sacred ground we fought so hard to keep and watch helplessly as the bulldozer’s sharp, jagged teeth devour the earth. The trucks plow a careless path over our memories and sift through our holy soil like a conquering soldier pillaging the pockets of the fallen.