Page 7 of Demon's Beauty

So much to do, I suppose, in service of our esteemed and illustrious king and queen. So many important tasks, so many asses to kiss. The work truly never ends.

I’ve almost made it through the cavernous space when the sound of my name stops me in my tracks.

“Finn,” a familiar, unwelcome voice calls to me from a side corridor.

“Father.”

He strides toward me with purpose.

He always has a purpose. Always an angle and something he expects to achieve. It must chafe him to no end to have a son who’s never had a purpose a day in his life.

“Good,” he says, though I’m not sure what he’s responding to or what’s so particularly good about this morning. “I was hoping to catch you before I left court.”

“Me? Why?”

He levels me with a stern look.

It’s a look I know well.

I’ve been seeing it since I was a child, after all, though at my current age it only serves to draw up the same exhaustion I feel whenever he deigns to talk to me.

“I wanted to see if you’d taken Eoghan up on his offer to get you a job in his practice.”

“Oh,” I say lightly, as if I’d forgotten the matter entirely. “I was supposed to speak to him about that, wasn’t I?”

I trained as a lawyer. Ostensibly.

Courts and solicitors’ offices are just so dreadfully boring, and as those are the places law tends to be practiced, it never seemed to hold my interest after I left university.

And ever since then, I’ve just been… being.

Being here at court.

Being away in some city or other, visiting with friends and generally making a nuisance of myself until it’s time to go somewhere else.

To be quite fair, though, it’s not like anyone has ever genuinely expected more of me.

With three older brothers who were always competing and scheming to get themselves into our father’s good graces, there were plenty of swaggering demon sons around to satisfy his need for legacy.

Like my younger sister, I take more after my mother, and have never quite found it in me to care about all of that.

“Yes,” my father says flatly. “You were.”

I’m certain that Eoghan, the eldest of my brothers, was just as happy not to hear from me as I was not to mention it to him.

But leave it to my father to continue to press the issue, never content with the fact he produced a disappointment among his brood of children.

Not that it means he’ll be kicking me out of the family fold anytime soon.

The only thing worse for my father than having a disappointment of a son is having a disappointment of a son who’s also destitute and bringing gossip down on the familyname, so for appearance’s sake he’s never cut off the purse strings.

I wonder if he ever will.

Some part of me is morbidly curious to find out.

What would I have to do for his scant goodwill to finally run dry? What would I have to do to be exiled from my family completely?

I’m sure someday I’ll find out, but today I’m more than content not to push my luck.