“Good morning, Daddy,” I say.
He stops where he’s standing to look at me. My heart beats hard and for a second, his face is blank.
But slowly, a smile spread across his lips. “Good morning, Hazel. You can put that down.”
I put the tray in the usual spot and pour him a cup as he sits down. “Do you want some?” he asks me.
I hesitate. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
He buzzes Rogers and asks for a second mug. Rogers brings it in without comment and leaves as I sit down in the chair in front of Mason’s desk. He pours me some coffee and we sip it together in silence for a moment.
“Yesterday, I promised you something,” he says softly, breaking the silence.
I cock my head. “What did you promise?”
“I said I’d tell you about myself. Tell you the truth. Do you still want to hear it?”
I nod. “I really do.”
He takes a deep breath and slowly lets it out. “The Ward family has always had money,” he says softly. I knew that already, since of course I did some research on him, but that’s about all I know. There were references to a wife that died mysteriously, but there’s not much about her, either. It’s like his whole life has been scrubbed off the Internet, nearly wiped clean.
“Our fortune was made in the early days of America. My great-great-great grandfather was named Wyatt. He was a banker back in Germany, but in America, he was a predatory loan shark.”
I bite my lip. “They had those?”
“Of course. If your crop failed one year, and you didn’t have enough money or food to feed your family, what did you do?”
“Went to your ancestor,” I say softly.
“Exactly. Wyatt would lend them the money at exorbitant interest and break their knees if they didn’t pay up. He was well ahead of his time in that regard, and slowly he amassed a fortune, which he passed down to his eldest son.
“That son went into banking, a more legitimate pursuit, and turned that original inherited fortune into an even larger one. So on and so forth, the money has been passed down through my family, until it reached me. I took over our current iteration, Ward Investing, but I come from a long line of blood-sucking money movers.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Blood sucking?”
“Blood money is probably a better term for it,” he says, leaning back and sipping his coffee. “Wyatt profited off the blood of people that were desperate. He was a scumbag, a bastard, but he was very successful. And in America, success is all that ever matters.”
“But your other ancestors got into banking. They weren’t out breaking knees or whatever.”
“No, they weren’t, but it’s the same thing. Maybe they didn’t kill you if you couldn’t pay, but they’d ruin your life in other ways. They’d take your your property, they’d ruin your credit, starve you out.” He sighs a little, looking out the window. “Ward Investing doesn’t actively starve anyone anymore, but we’re still built on blood money, don’t you ever forget it.”
I can see how haunted he is by his past and his present. It’s clearly digging at him, and I wonder if it’s part of why he locked himself up in this tower.
“What I don’t get is, if you hate it so much, why are you doing it?”
He shakes his head. “That’s a good question. I just don’t know the answer to it. Maybe because I don’t know any other way, or maybe because I’m as rotten as all the Wards that came before me.”
“You’re not rotten,” I say softly.
His eyes light on mine, fire and brimstone. “You don’t know that.”
“I don’t think you are, at least.”
He sighs and rubs his eyes. “That’s the story of my past, anyway. Each new link in the Ward family chain has grown the fortune bigger than what was left to him, like a steward guarding a fire, feeding it constantly to keep it burning. I’m the last Ward now and part of me wants to give every single cent I have away to people that actually deserve it instead of hoarding more and more.”
I frown a little bit. It seems so strange that he sounds so bitter about his money. I wish I had even a fraction of the money he does, and yet clearly that old cliché about money and happiness has some weight.
He has all the money in the world, but he isn’t happy with it.
“Did you always feel this way about your family?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Not at all. For a long, long time I felt like the Ward family was important. I was raised to believe that since we have a lot of money, we’re better than other people. I bought that old bullshit.”
“You know better now?” I ask him, raising an eyebrow.