“This is rigged!” Delphine screamed, slamming her hands on the velvet rail, every scrap of her borrowed class gone.

“I paid top dollar.

I demand an investigation.

How does my son lose to two fatherless nobodies?” Auberon shrank into his seat and buried his face in his hands, humiliated in front of the world.

Chapter 5 — They Are My Sons

I turned my head slowly and looked at my wife’s distorted, screaming face, and then back at the stage where my flesh and blood stood like young kings, and the size of what I had thrown away crushed the air out of me.

I had traded a dynasty of brilliant, fierce men for a hollow woman and a broken boy — and I had done it on purpose, and called it strategy.