Chapter 136: An Unfortunate Side Effect.
Richard and Arthur stood near the elevator bank, the meeting long since wrapped, papers signed, the twenty-million-dollar retainer already routed to processing. Arthur assumed they were on their way out, gathering his coat, mentally cataloging the win they’d just secured.
That was when the door opened and Mrs. Harriet walked in.
Arthur’s jaw tightened the instant he saw her, fist clenching at his side before he consciously registered doing it. He forced it open again just as fast, aware of exactly how visible that reaction could be in a room this quiet.
He hated her. Had hated her for longer than he could clearly trace back, though the reasons had shifted and sharpened over the years into something more specific, more textured than simple dislike. But hating her did nothing. She was still his brother’s wife, still untouchable in any direct sense, and the case he was quietly assembling against her — the late nights, the unexplained absences, the pattern he was certain existed underneath the surface of her marriage — wasn’t complete. Not yet. He had fragments. He needed the whole picture before he could bring any of it to Richard.
What Arthur didn’t know — couldn’t have known, given how carefully Richard guarded even the smallest details of his own private life — was that his entire pursuit was, in a very real sense, chasing something that had never been hidden from Richard at all.
Because Richard knew.
Had always known, in fact, in the specific and deliberate way a man knows something he engineered himself. His condition with his wife had never been secrecy for its own sake — it was standards. Whoever she chose, whenever she chose him, had to meet a bar Richard himself had set which had proven impossibld until now. Competent. Sharp. Someone with real potential, not simply attractive company for an evening. It wasn’t about jealousy or control in the traditional sense. It was about maintaining a certain caliber around his own name, even in the parts of his life he never spoke of publicly.
Arthur had no access to any of this. And ironically, that blind spot was exactly what had sparked his obsession with Liam in the first place.
It went back further than Arthur usually let himself acknowledge, back to Liam’s very first months at the firm. Arthur hadn’t known his name then — hadn’t needed to, not yet — but he’d noticed the pattern immediately, the way certain cases that should have taken senior partners months to untangle were closing faster, cleaner, with a level of precision that didn’t track for someone that junior. High-profile cases. Cases that would have challenged partners twice his age, let alone an associate barely a few years out of his bar exam.
That alone would have been notable. What made it impossible to ignore was the trajectory that followed — the promotion to senior associate at a speed that had no real precedent within the firm’s history, the income attached to it, all of it accelerating far faster than the normal internal politics should have allowed.
That kind of movement didn’t happen without approval from the top. Arthur knew that instinctively, the same way he knew every lever in that building and who actually controlled it.
And Richard didn’t do things preemptively. Arthur had spent a lifetime studying his older brother closely enough to know that much for certain — Richard never moved on instinct, never extended favor without calculation behind it. If Liam’s rise had Richard’s fingerprints on it, however faint, there had to be a reason.
Arthur’s first assumption had been Mrs. Harriet. It made a certain kind of sense — she held real influence within the firm’s internal decisions, and if she’d taken a personal interest in a promising young associate, she’d have brought the recommendation to her husband the way she brought most decisions of consequence. And Richard, trusting her judgment, would have signed off without much scrutiny at all.
That theory held for a while. Arthur built around it, quietly, patiently, watching Liam’s career from a distance and cataloging everything that didn’t quite fit a normal associate’s rise.
Then, a few years back, something happened that Arthur had never fully been able to explain.
Richard had approached him directly — unusual in itself, given how rarely Richard engaged with the firm’s junior staff on any personal level — and asked, vaguely, without using a name, about a young associate closing cases at an unusual rate. Arthur remembered the moment clearly: standing in his brother’s office, giving a rundown of Liam’s file while Richard sat listening with an expression Arthur couldn’t quite place at the time, something closer to quiet satisfaction than simple curiosity.
Arthur hadn’t understood what he was looking at then. He still didn’t, not fully. But it planted something in him that never fully resolved — a suspicion that Liam’s rise wasn’t just Mrs. Harriet’s doing, that Richard himself had some direct, unexplained investment in this specific man’s success, for reasons Arthur couldn’t access no matter how much information he gathered.
That suspicion curdled into something closer to obsession over time. If Richard was invested in Liam succeeding, then derailing him became, in Arthur’s mind, less about petty rivalry and more about proving something — that his own read on people, his own instincts, still mattered in a firm where his brother’s judgment reigned unquestioned.
The best way to slow a man like that down, Arthur had eventually decided, wasn’t through work. Liam’s performance was airtight, immune to the usual internal sabotage Arthur might have leaned on with a lesser associate. It had to be something personal. Something that would bleed into his focus slowly enough that it wouldn’t look deliberate.
A woman.
It was almost elegant, in Arthur’s mind, at the time. Introduce the right kind of distraction, let it play out naturally, and watch the performance start to slip on its own.
Except it hadn’t. Liam’s work had remained exactly as sharp as it always was, untouched by whatever chaos Sara had introduced into his personal life, which only deepened Arthur’s frustration and his certainty that something about this man defied the normal rules everyone else operated under.
But if the plan hadn’t worked exactly as intended in the way Arthur first imagined — Sara, in the end, had still become the very thing that finally brought Liam down.
Just not for any of the reasons Arthur originally thought.