Cornelius Ashcombe was a name Flynn had heard at our wedding and filed away as a dead old man with an old-fashioned way of speaking.

He never asked what my grandfather had done, or built, or owned.

Why would he?

He had already decided who I was.

My grandfather was, to Flynn, a piece of sentimental family history, no more relevant to his empire than a faded photograph on my mother’s wall.

He could not have been more wrong, and he was about to find out in the most expensive way a man has ever found out anything.

Chapter 7 — The Dormant Clause