I Spoke Eight Languages In A Minute To Save My Family Chapter 09
Celeste stared at the scalpel in my hand and couldn’t stop shaking.
Her hair had come apart completely, wet strands stuck to her forehead. She looked like a different
person.
“What the hell are you, Adrian?”
She sagged in the chair, and the sound that came out of her wasn’t quite a scream. Something
rawer.
“Monster? Me?” I tilted my head. “I’m just the Mercer family’s harmless youngest son.”
I spun the scalpel between my fingers, the blade flashing as it turned, easy, weightless, like I’d been doing it my whole life.
In my last life, I ran the largest financial empire on the planet. I didn’t get there by being kind.
Everything Celeste had built looked like a school project from where I was standing.
Thud.
Celeste slid out of her chair. Her knees cracked against the floor.
She crawled, actually crawled, to my mother and latched onto her legs. “Victoria, Mrs. Mercer, I wasn’t thinking. I swear I wasn’t thinking.”
“Please. Our mothers were friends. That has to count for something.”
“I don’t want Mercer Group. I’ll pull every fund. All of it. Gone.”
She was a mess: tears, mascara, everything running down her face. Nothing left of the woman who’d been sipping Earl Grey an hour ago.
My mother looked down at her.
No pity. Not a trace of it. Just ice.
Celeste hadn’t thought about friendship when she lined up seven women in front of a cutting board.
“Get off her.”
Tessa’s boot caught Celeste in the shoulder and sent her sprawling.
Celeste grabbed her shoulder and looked up at me. Desperation. Pure desperation.
She got it now. The person holding her fate wasn’t my mother. Wasn’t Meredith.
It was the kid everyone in Alderwyn had laughed at for the last decade.
“Adrian, please. You’re better than this. I know you are.”
Celeste was on her knees, head bowed and trembling like a leaf.
“Let me walk out of here and I’ll sign over three overseas wineries and two hundred million from my Swiss account. All yours.”
A bribe. She actually tried to bribe me.
The scalpel stopped spinning.
I walked to her and crouched down.
I touched the flat of the blade to her cheek. Gentle. Almost tender.
She flinched.
“Two hundred million. That’s what you think this is worth?”
I held her eyes. Conversational. Almost bored.
“Fifteen minutes ago you offered ten million to keep me as a pet.”
“Now you’re offering two hundred million to buy your way out.”
“Celeste, you’re not pricing yourself very high.”
Something behind her eyes broke.
She wasn’t looking at a twenty–something anymore. Whatever she saw in my eyes had lived a lot longer than that.
The look of someone who’d decided, more than once, who got to keep breathing.
I stood. In one motion, I buried the scalpel in the conference table.
It sank an inch into solid wood. The handle quivered.
I didn’t cut off her hand.
She wasn’t worth the mess.
I pulled out my phone and dialed.
“nancial Crimes Division? Good.”
“I’m filing a real–name report. Whitlock Group. Cross–border money laundering, market manipulation, and financial fraud.”
“I’ve already sent the evidence package to your internal inbox.”
I hung up and looked down at what was left of Celeste.
“Sorry.”
I tapped her leg with the toe of my shoe.
“I don’t do charity for people who bore me. Have fun making friends in federal lockup.”
