Page 79 of Beau and the Beast

How could you explain to someone that your father had found so many intricate ways to sabotage all that you were as a human being, to crush you without ever laying a hand on you? He’d injured Wolfram in so many ways, but instead of gashes and wounds, Isidore had left a network of nearly-invisible scars, as fine as spider’s silk.

Wolfram did his best. He tried to lay out examples from different eras of his life. Isidore had never been present at his childhood birthday parties. He’d never uttered a compliment. He hadn’t taught Wolfram how to drive.

It all sounded so lame when he tried to explain it. Could these little slights really add up enough to make Beau understand what it had been like?

It wasn’t until Wolfram had gotten to college that he understood how backward his relationship with Isidore was. The boys from his dorm had civil conversations with their parents on the phone. They didn’t get terse letters from their fathers that sent them spiraling into anxiety for days on end, dreading their next trip home. They didn’t have to beg their mothers to act as intermediaries.

They didn’t live in fear of their fathers’ bad moods—they lived their lives and enjoyed the reality of collegiate independence.

Every time Wolfram had fooled himself into thinking that he could be like them, could exist without Isidore’s constant approval, it was as if his father could sense it and the man would tighten his reins—would find some way to push in the next pin, to remind Wolfram of the fact that Isidore was paying all the bills and always had.

The two years that Wolfram spent working, before he joined IW Securities Group, had been the best of his entire life.

“For the first time, I was actually paying my own bills,” Wolfram said. “I know that you’ve done that for a decade, so it must sound silly.”

“Not at all,” Beau said, shaking his head. “It’s not silly. It’s simply the way your reality was.”

“I felt as if I was allowed to feel any way I wanted—like for once in my life, I didn’t have to ask my father’s permission for everything that I did. And even though I had gone to the college he wanted me to attend and gotten a job where he wanted me to work in a field he’d forced me to pursue, I felt like I was my own man. I felt the best I ever had.”

He’d moved into an apartment near his office. He’d found a schedule he enjoyed. He made friends with mid-level executives like himself.

It hadn’t lasted long.

“I started working for my father in 1997.”

Beau grinned. “I was in second grade.”

“Yes, I’m ancient,” Wolfram said, rolling his eyes. “I appreciate the reminder.”

Beau laughed and apologized for interrupting.

“I knew I shouldn’t work for him—that it would just open me back up to being terrorized by him all the time.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“That was the year my mother got sick.”

Perhaps it was this as much as the reality of his father that Wolfram had been avoiding talking about. Even after Beau had told him everything about his parents, Wolfram had dreaded talking about her, the diagnosis that his father had so cruelly twisted and used to manipulate him, the way she’d wasted over the course of a year until she was practically unrecognizable.

“He convinced me that I needed to move home to help take care of her, but in retrospect it was all a fairy tale. We did nothing special to give her care—left all of that to the live-in nurses Isidore bought. He rode me harder than my old employer, and though I spent the last year of her life in the same house with her, I feel almost as if I saw my mother less than I ever had before.”

Wolfram sighed and fought back the emotions that made his throat tight.

“And then she was gone. And I was trapped in that house with a monster of a man.”

The decade Wolfram spent working for Isidore before the crash went exactly the way one would predict judging from the way their relationship had been up to that point. Isidore did everything he could to make Wolfram feel insignificant, ignorant, andjust fine—alwaysfine.

Worse still, Isidore was able to turn everyone else at the firm against him.

To the outside world, Wolfram looked like a rising financial star—like someone to be envied, a man with everything. But within the doors of IWSG, he was reviled as someone who hadn’t earned his spot. He’d gotten the job through sheer nepotism—not hard work or actual talent. And despite the fact that Wolfram had proven himself time and time again, the massive and unfair bonuses that Isidore sent his way sealed Wolfram’s fate as the villain of the company.

“That’s insidious,” Beau said, interrupting him. “You couldn’t complain about getting paid a bonus, but of course it would make everyone hate you. And you’d sound like a madman if you tried to say that he’d done it on purpose.”

Wolfram nodded. “That’s our entire relationship, boiled down to its essence.”

The people who had been left, who still wanted to spend time with Wolfram, were the worst of the worst—the hangers on who hoped to gain wealth and status by proximity.

He’d been lucky, of course, to find good staff members—Violet, Song, and the others. Wolfram felt no guilt when he poached some of the best employees from other departments. Why would he feel bad about inconveniencing people who so often made it clear that they detested him?

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