Chapter 144: Hello Liam, I’m Arthur. [FIXED!]

Liam walked further from the hotel than he’d initially intended, his feet carrying him without much conscious direction while his mind stayed occupied elsewhere. He hadn’t opened the message. Couldn’t quite bring himself to, not because he was afraid of what it said, but because he understood exactly what opening it would signal.

Sara was manipulative. That much he’d learned the hard way, and learned thoroughly enough that the lesson had stuck. If he opened that message now, even out of simple curiosity, it would tell her something he had no interest in confirming — that she still occupied enough space in his head to warrant a response, that whatever silence he’d maintained since everything fell apart hadn’t actually meant what it should have meant.

He sighed, shoving the phone back into his pocket. She should be the least interesting part of his life right now. Objectively, she was. He had an actual, functioning rebate system reshaping his entire trajectory, something he still didn’t fully understand the mechanics of, something that had appeared without explanation and could, for all he knew, disappear the same way.

Thirty-one days. That number kept surfacing whenever his mind had room to wander, an anxious little countdown ticking somewhere in the back of his thoughts. He had no idea what happened once it ran out — whether the whole system simply evaporated, whether the results he’d already banked would remain, whether this entire strange Chapter of his life came with an expiration date he couldn’t see the edges of yet.

That uncertainty gnawed at him more than he usually let himself acknowledge.

He kept walking, distracted enough that he didn’t register the unfamiliar streets until he actually stopped and looked around, realizing he had no immediate sense of where he was relative to the hotel. Irritation flickered through him — the idea of retracing his steps back through streets he didn’t recognize wasn’t appealing, though he supposed that was the point of walking out here in the first place. He’d needed to clear his head. Getting slightly lost in the process felt almost fitting.

He took a single step to reorient himself.

"Are you Liam?"

The voice stopped him cold.

He recognized it instantly — there was no mistaking it, not after the phone call days earlier, the same measured, deliberate tone that had introduced itself only enough to unsettle him before hanging up.

Arthur.

Liam’s first instinct was to keep walking, to pretend he hadn’t heard, hadn’t registered the voice at all. There was no logical reason for Arthur to be standing on this particular street, at this particular hour, unless the location itself hadn’t been an accident.

He kept moving, deliberately unbothered, forcing his pace to stay even.

Arthur didn’t chase him. He simply raised his voice slightly, enough to carry.

"I know what’s going on with Mrs. Harriet. I have evidence."

Liam stopped.

The words landed with more weight than he wanted to admit, cutting straight through whatever composure he’d been holding onto a second earlier. He stood there for a moment, back still turned, weighing whether engaging was even remotely wise.

Curiosity won.

He turned slowly as Arthur approached, closing the distance at an unhurried, almost casual pace, hands tucked into his coat pockets like this was nothing more than a pleasant evening stroll that happened to intersect with Liam’s.

"Hello, Liam," Arthur said, stopping a few feet away, extending a hand that Liam made no move to take. "I’m Arthur. I imagine you’ve heard about me."

Liam studied him for a long moment, taking in the face that matched the voice — sharp-featured, older than his tone suggested, something calculating sitting behind his eyes that Liam recognized immediately, the same quality he’d learned to spot in courtrooms full of people who thought they held more leverage than they actually did.

"I’ve heard the name," Liam said finally, voice flat. "Can’t say I know much beyond that."

"That’s understandable." Arthur’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. "Richard doesn’t exactly advertise my existence."

Liam said nothing, waiting, refusing to fill the silence first.

"I’ll get straight to it, since I doubt you’re in the mood for pleasantries," Arthur continued. "I have information about Mrs. Harriet that I think you’d find valuable. Given your history with the firm, and hers."

"And why would you be sharing that with me?"

Arthur’s smile widened slightly, though it never reached anywhere close to his eyes.

"Because I think we might actually want the same thing, Liam. Just for very different reasons."

-

Richard sat across from his wife in the quiet of their living room, a rare stretch of evening where neither of them had anywhere else to be. It had become something of a pattern lately — small pockets of actual presence carving their way into a marriage that had operated on parallel tracks for longer than either wanted to admit out loud.

He watched her for a moment before speaking, turning something over in his mind that had been building for a while now.

"Arthur," he said finally.

Mrs. Harriet glanced up from her glass, expression neutral. "What about him?"

"His scrutiny of you. It’s worse than I remember it being."

That wasn’t an accusation. Richard had long since accepted the tension between his wife and his brother as a fixed feature of his household, something both of them had reported to him independently over the years, each account colored by whatever grievance currently sat at the top of their respective lists. He understood the shape of their dynamic well enough by now — mutual dislike, old and calcified, neither side particularly interested in resolving it.

But something about the current stretch felt different. Sharper. More deliberate than the usual friction.

"You’ve noticed too, then," she said.

"I have."

She set her glass down slowly, considering how much of this she actually wanted to open up. Richard rarely pushed on matters like this, content most of the time to let their respective territories remain separate. The fact that he was asking directly now meant something had genuinely caught his attention.

"Has he given me any reason to be behaving this way toward you?" Richard asked. "Have you given him one?"

Mrs. Harriet held his gaze for a long moment before deciding, finally, to lay it out plainly.

"It’s about Liam," she said.

Richard’s expression didn’t shift much, though something behind his eyes sharpened slightly at the name. He knew Liam, at least in the sense that mattered — a name his wife had brought to him personally, years back, recommending his advancement with enough conviction that Richard had approved it without much resistance.

He trusted her instincts in that arena more than almost anyone else’s, and she rarely spent that trust on anyone she didn’t genuinely believe in.

"Go on," Richard said.

So she told him. All of it, methodically, the way she approached most difficult conversations — Liam’s termination, engineered quietly and executed without her knowledge until it was already finalized. The way Arthur had moved behind the scenes to ensure it happened cleanly, efficiently, with no room for her to intervene before the decision became permanent but with the loophole that came with it.

Richard listened without interrupting, his expression unreadable in the way it usually was, though Mrs. Harriet had learned over the years to read the smaller signals underneath the stillness — a slight tightening around his jaw, the particular quiet that meant he was recalculating something in real time.

"You didn’t know," Richard said eventually. Not quite a question.

"Not until after it was done."

"And Arthur handled it entirely on his own authority?" Richard asked her.

"It would seem so."

Richard sat with that for a moment, turning it over with the same careful precision he applied to everything else in his life. He understood, better than most, exactly what it meant for his brother to move against someone without bringing it through proper channels first. Arthur rarely acted alone on anything of consequence — not because he lacked initiative, but because he understood the risk of operating without cover if things went wrong.

The fact that he’d done it anyway, quietly, deliberately excluding Mrs. Harriet from any part of the process, told Richard something significant about how much this particular matter meant to his brother.

"You saw something in him," Richard said. "Before all of this."

"I did."

"But he hadn’t proven it yet. Not fully." Richard added.

Mrs. Harriet’s mouth curved slightly, something wry settling into the expression.

"No. He hadn’t."

Richard considered that, and the irony of it settled in slowly, deliberately, the way most realizations did with him. Whatever potential his wife had recognized in Liam early on had remained mostly theoretical up until recently — promise without full proof behind it, the kind of raw talent that needed the right pressure applied to actually surface.

And Arthur, in his attempt to eliminate that potential before it could fully develop, had inadvertently applied exactly that pressure. The termination, the humiliation, whatever engineered collapse Arthur had orchestrated — it hadn’t buried Liam the way Arthur intended. If anything, judging by what Richard already knew through other channels, it had forced something out of him that might never have surfaced under ordinary circumstances.

Richard almost allowed himself something close to amusement at that, though it never quite reached the surface of his expression.

"So my brother," he said slowly, "in trying to destroy the man you saw promise in, may have been the one who actually revealed it amd achieved the outcome of last night."

Mrs. Harriet met his eyes evenly.

"That’s precisely what happened, as far as I can tell."

Richard leaned back, quiet for a long moment, processing the full weight of what that meant — not just for Liam, not just for his wife’s judgment being validated in a roundabout, unintended way, but for what it revealed about Arthur himself. His brother wasn’t simply protecting the firm’s interests with this. This had never been about business, not really.

"I need to understand what’s actually driving him," Richard said finally, more to himself than to her. "Because this isn’t strategy anymore. This is personal."