Normally he wouldn’t have minded the familiar old clock. It might have even been a comfort, considering he hadn’t heard it for so long. But today he was hungover like a piece of wet laundry, a headache splitting his temples in two. Now, that wasn’t particularly odd for his average Sunday morning. Usually he’d be wrapped up in a pair of shapely legs—sometimes two pairs if he’d played his cards right the night before.
But emergency tea with the de Vries clan matriarch? At ten in the morning? In New York, four hours from his apartment in Boston? Not Eric’s modus operandi. Not by a long shot.
It didn’t help that he hadn’t seen his family in close to ten years, and the last time wasn’t pretty. “Call me when someone’s dying.” Famous last words to Celeste de Vries, the formidable head of the de Vries family. Right before he stormed out of this very penthouse to make a life of his own, separate from this tangled web of power and manipulation.
Well. She did.
“Madame will see you now, Master Eric.”
Eric looked up to find Garrett, Grandmother’s butler, waiting for him in the hall. It was amazing. The man really hadn’t changed in a decade, despite being as ancient as ever. Eric was thirty-two, with the filled-out chest, occasional gray hair, and three fine lines over his forehead to show for his time away. But Garrett was just as much of a well-maintained antique as the Ming vase sitting in the foyer or the salmon-colored wainscoting of the penthouse’s halls. He was an anachronism, something frozen in time. A butler in New York City in the twenty-first century. But that was Grandmother. Tradition or death.
“Thanks, Garrett.” Eric followed the butler to the parlor at the southeast corner of the apartment.
Yes. His grandmother had a parlor nestled in a maze of hallways crisscrossing the complete top floor of a building she owned on Eighty-Seventh Street and Park Avenue. In New York City, one of the most crowded places on the planet, his ninety-pound grandmother occupied more space than the mayor.
Nothing in that room had changed either. Not the priceless antiques, the Chesterfield furniture, not even the family portrait that was painted twenty-five years ago at her famous rose garden in the Hamptons. There was Eric’s father, mother, and him as a child; next to his aunt, uncle, and their daughter, Nina; plus a whole host of extended family, all presided over by Grandmother, sitting in the middle of them like a brood hen.
Their smiles were the opposite of genuine. The kinds of smiles where people stare imperiously at the camera without showing their veneered teeth. Blue and gray eyes vacant in the summer sunlight. Despite the life blooming all around them, everyone was dead inside.
A flood of memories washed over Eric. Him at five, in knee socks and a sweater vest, trying not to fidget while Grandmother lectured all the ways he was expected to fulfill his destiny as the heir to the family fortune. Nina, his younger cousin, listening curiously while she tugged at her braids and clutched a stuffed panda.
Eric at eleven, arguing over playing fucking polo in Westchester instead of baseball in Central Park like he wanted. Like his father, deceased just a few months prior, had promised. Nina had cried and been shuttled to her etiquette lessons.
Eighteen, howling his decision to attend Dartmouth instead of Princeton like the rest of the de Vries clan. Nina, watching with wide eyes while she focused on her homework. She would attend Smith, of course, like her mother, Violet.
And the last time. Twenty-two, fresh out of school with a degree in English instead of finance. Eric was expected to take the reins of the family business, but instead he gave it the finger and went to Harvard Law instead. He had enough money in the trust from Father’s death to pay for it himself. Okay, so it wasn’t much of a rebellion, trading one white-collar career for another. But he did it himself, and did it without being held under the cranky, wrinkled thumb of the resident tyrant of the Upper East Side.
Celeste Annika Van Dusen de Vries.
“Grandson.”
Her voice also sounded exactly the same: sharp, but rough around the edges, like a serrated knife. But when Eric turned toward the leather armchair under the original Van Gogh, he found the one thing that had changed completely: Grandmother herself.
She was never a big woman, but now she stooped like a vulture,